Syslinux - Dec 2004 - Network disk? (like memdisk but over the network)

Hi,

I've successfully got DOS booting over PXE with Memdisk, but as RAM is
severely limited in the PCs I'm using (only 32-64MB) I can't load a huge
Memdisk image to run large DOS programs, Windows, etc.

Are there any programs out there like Memdisk, but instead of storing
the disk in RAM they read it over the network?  (A "netdisk" program.)
This would be a really useful lightweight solution, as it's pretty
painful trying to mount a network drive through DOS for the same sort of
thing.

Thanks,
Adam.

Adam Nielsen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've successfully got DOS booting over PXE with Memdisk, but as RAM is
> severely limited in the PCs I'm using (only 32-64MB) I can't load a
huge
> Memdisk image to run large DOS programs, Windows, etc.
> 
> Are there any programs out there like Memdisk, but instead of storing
> the disk in RAM they read it over the network?  (A "netdisk"
program.)
> This would be a really useful lightweight solution, as it's pretty
> painful trying to mount a network drive through DOS for the same sort of
> thing.
> 
I think there is one called "Netware", made by the same company that 
makes SuSE Linux.  ;)  I there is also an open source version of the 
server called MARS-NWE, http://www.compu-art.de/mars_nwe/; apparently 
there is also a set of clients available.

In all seriousness, though, it's actually not really that much harder to 
write a network filesystem client for DOS than it's to write a netdisk 
program, so I suspect that it really wouldn't make much sense.

The sick part is that I've actually written a server like that (it 
didn't use the network, it used a different communications mechanism), 
but I wrote it for hire and can't release it.  It would have to be 
ported to use the network, anyway.

	-hpa

> Adam Nielsen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've successfully got DOS booting over PXE with Memdisk, but as RAM is
> severely limited in the PCs I'm using (only 32-64MB) I can't load a
huge
> Memdisk image to run large DOS programs, Windows, etc.
>
> Are there any programs out there like Memdisk, but instead of storing
> the disk in RAM they read it over the network?  (A "netdisk"
program.)
> This would be a really useful lightweight solution, as it's pretty
> painful trying to mount a network drive through DOS for the same sort of
> thing.
>
>
Try bart's network bootdisk, and connect it to a windows/samba share with
something like: net use <letter>: \\<server>\<share>

I have it working on a win98 laptop with some ancient processor, running
tfptd32.