Ultimate Boot CD RULES!! or, a way to get multiple NICS on a ghost boot disk

[Joemonkey]

I have a few PCs without floppy drives in them, and they have different NICs in them. I would like to have a ghost boot disk that I turn into a Boot CD that gives me a menu like something below

Press 1 to boot to ghost with D-Link support
Press 2 to boot to ghost with FA312 support
Press 3 to boot to ghost with FA310 support


It can probably be done using the choice command in autoexec.bat, but I'm not too handy with it... any ideas?

 

[Need4Speed]

check out BART's network floppy, it has drivers for the most popular cards.

http://www.nu2.nu/bootdisk/network/

 

[Joemonkey]

i need to put ghost.exe onto the disk, but with all the stuff i have to put on there for the network boot disk, i don't have room

is there anything i can use to create a boot image file from a floppy, then open the .img file with something else and add files to it?

 

[Nothinman]

I wouldn't do that, depending on the software you might lose the bootblock when you resave the image. Generally it's a real PITA to do multiple-drivers on the same disk with MS' IP networking client although with NetWare it's dead simple.

I would look into getting a copy of WinPE (or using Bart's PE Builder) and setting that up, as long as the drivers are supported out of the box by XP you don't have to select anything at all.

 

[Joemonkey]

well in case anyone is interested, this is how i did it:

I used rawread to make images of the 4 ghost disks i use for the 4 different NICs in the systems

I used WinISO to extract the ultimate boot CD iso, copied the 4 floppy images to the images folder, then i edited the bscript.ini file to make a new menu that pointed to the new images

Then I used the mkisofs file to make a new bootable ISO, and voila! had the ultimate boot cd along with an extra menu to ghost to seperate NICs...

all the instructions can be found at www.ultimatebootcd.com


and if this is all old news, i apologize... i have known about the ultimate boot cd for about a year, but this is the first time i customized it.

 

[SearchMaster]

Thanks, great information!

I was just about to respond before I read your last post...I had done exactly what you described in the original post, which is created a bootable CD with the network drivers for all the cards I have on my network. I'm not very knowledgeable about how to best create a boot CD, so I ended up having to make a bootable USB key, and create a bootable CD from it using Nero since all the drivers wouldn't fit on a floppy.

I'm going to try your method, though, because I've been wanting to have more stuff on my CDs.

 

[kd7fhd]

Doesn't Nero allow you to select "emulate a hard drive" option when creating a boot CD?

 

[SearchMaster]

Yes, but it only has the floppy and the USB key drives listed as potential sources of boot files.

Again, I'm not terribly knowledgeable on the subject, and will take any advice that is given. With three kids under the age of 5, I have very little time to experiment on things like this .

 

[SearchMaster]

Update:

Joemonkey, you ROCK! I had struggled a while back with the boot disk stuff at www.nu2.nu, but couldn't really make heads nor tails of it (and I work with computers for a living - probably just an overall lack of time to mess with it). But using the information at www.ultimatebootcd.com and the instructions you gave, I was able to create a far, far superior boot disk to what I had, including my customized Ghost boot images for my various network cards. This is EXACTLY what I wanted.

Thanks again!

 

[Joemonkey]

Originally posted by: SearchMaster
Update: Joemonkey, you ROCK! I had struggled a while back with the boot disk stuff at www.nu2.nu, but couldn't really make heads nor tails of it (and I work with computers for a living - probably just an overall lack of time to mess with it). But using the information at www.ultimatebootcd.com and the instructions you gave, I was able to create a far, far superior boot disk to what I had, including my customized Ghost boot images for my various network cards. This is EXACTLY what I wanted. Thanks again!

heh, no problem man, once i figured out how sweet it was, i just HAD to share what i did with someone, and i figured this was the best place to do it

it's funny, if you go to one of the ultimate boot cd sites, there's a big warning telling you that if you don't have time to re-make all your boot disks, don't bother learning how to customize the ultimate boot cd, cuz you'll spend all your time doing it, and they are right!