nwbt-dos

Geoff's Universal NetWare boot disk instructions.

Note that this boot disk is IPX only. http://www.otcnetworks.com/NWBT-DOS.ZIP

For an IP/IPX boot disk, see http://www.veder.com/nwdsk/

An alternative (IP only) boot disk http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/netware/features/trenches/tr_dos_bootdisk_nw.html

Most of the software on this disk is copyrighted property of Microsoft (DOS 6.22 and Win95), Novell (NetWare clients), and others (NIC drivers) and is included ONLY as a reference showing what files are needed. It is the responsibility of the user to verify that any files you are not licensed to use are removed or replaced with ones you are licensed to use. If you are not licensed to use any of the necessary software, you may not use this disk. For that reason (among others), I have not included the necessary boot files. You must provide the boot files (and replace any DOS files on this disk with ones compatible with your version of DOS)

This boot disk is provided as-is and without any warranty or support of any kind. I hope you find it useful, but I created this for myself and have chosen to allow others to use it. However, I must request that you do not redistribute it outside your own organization.

You are allowed to modify this disk in whatever fashion you desire so long as doing so does not violate your license agreements with other parties (i.e. Microsoft, Novell, etc.) You may not redistribute your changes outside your organization.

Format a bootable disk with DOS 3.31 or later (FORMAT A: /s or SYS A: if already formatted).

Extract all the files in this archive (including the directory structure) into an empty directory (or the root directory of a bootable floppy). If you're using the DOS version of PKUNZIP, the command is PKUNZIP -D NWBT-DOS. If you extracted the files to a directory on your HD, copy all the files in this archive to the floppy disk.

If you're not using MS-DOS 6.22, replace the files in the DOS directory of the floppy with the corresponding files from your version of DOS or you will have problems with version conflicts. Although I haven't tried it, the Caldera DR-DOS that is shipped on the boot disk of recent versions of NetWare will probably work fine. DR-DOS is available from http://www.drdos.org/

The version of EDIT on this disk comes from Win95, however it does work with DOS 6.22 (probably others as well) and is smaller and more flexible than the EDIT that comes with DOS 6.22.

Win95/98 DOS may cause occasional lockups running Ghost or PQDI when booted from this boot disk. This is unconfirmed at present, but appears to be specific to some ODI drivers. MS-DOS 6.2x is recommended if available.

If you're using Win95/Win98 DOS, edit CONFIG.SYS and remove all references to EMM386 and delete EMM386.EXE from the DOS directory. You may also do this to save space on disk if you don't need the extra RAM that EMM386 can free up for DOS programs. Also, for Win95/98/ME, you should copy XCOPY32.EXE and/or XCOPY32.MOD to the DOS directory.

If you use Win9x DOS from Win95a (aka OSR2) or later, you will be able to access FAT32 partitions in addition to FAT12/16 partitions. The same should apply to WinME/XP DOS boot disks, but I have not tested this.

To Add NIC drivers, copy the ODI Driver file to the \NWCLIENT\ODIDRV directory and edit \NWCLIENT\NET.CFG to add a LINK DRIVER odi_drv_name section for your NIC.

To remove an unneeded NIC driver, delete the driver from the \NWCLIENT\ODIDRV directory. It is not necessary to remove the corresponding Link Driver section, but you may do so if you wish.

Upon reboot, it will attempt to load drivers until one loads successfully. If the disk is write enabled, it writes a log of successful and failed driver loads to \NWCLIENT\NETCFG.BAT which is used to remember which driver was last loaded successfully. This will speed up additional boot attempts for machines using the same NIC since it will try loading that driver first. Some ODI drivers do not clear the errorlevel setting before exiting, when these drivers load, the boot disk will continue trying to load additional drivers until all have been tried. This should not cause any problems, just a slower boot process. Some older ODI drivers may lockup if the card they support is not installed in the machine, these drivers will work as long as they are the last (or only) driver in the \NWCLIENT\ODIDRV directory.

You may speed up login slightly by setting a preferred server and/or preferred tree in \NWCLIENT\NET.CFG.

These files can be used on a drive other than A: by changing the

SET BOOTDRV=A: line in \AUTOEXEC.BAT.

Most of the files in the DOS directory can be deleted to save space on disk. The included files are ones that I frequently find handy.