Network Boot Disks

There has been enormous interest in information surrounding the creation of network bootable diskettes. We offer the following resources already:

Network Boot Disk User Forum - Discuss issues and answers with others
Network Boot Disk FAQ - A gathering of information and links on the subject
Network Boot Disk: How To - An article describing how to go about creating a network boot disk using NT server.

Many looking to create a network boot disk are doing so for the purpose of imaging. Some of the network boot disk creation utilities that come with these imaging programs are better than others and creating your own from scratch can become a necessity. Creating your own allow you to can gain space, customize actions and add support for more than one network card. We downloaded the demos of each of the big four imaging products and had a good look at the tools they provide for creating a network boot disk.

For what is good and bad about each, as well as a screen-shot walk through of setup and operation, click on the tool by name below:

PowerQuest Boot Disk Builder
- A component of DeployCenter, this is the best of the bunch. A low overhead MS-DOS alternative and support for auto-detection of multiple network cards. It also provides the greatest amount of free space for any customizations or additions you are looking to add.
Altiris Boot Disk Creator
- A component of Deployment Solution, this tool provides a great interface for saving and editing your disks. It requires you supply a Windows 9x CD or a handful of files you can obtain from a Windows 9x computer. Provides support for a single network card driver.
Symantec Ghost Boot Wizard
- A component of Ghost Corporate Edition. Tied for second, this does not provide support for supplying a password for automatic logon. A a static computer name must be specified in the wizard which will keep you from being able to use a second copy on another machine.
StorageSoft ImageCast ClientBuilder
- A component of ImageCast, this is the worst of the lot. Although an alternative to MS-DOS is provided, it is not supported and is presented as a manual process not supported by the ClientBuilder tool. For automatic logon it warns that EMM386 is required but to tool does not facilitate this either.

	DOS Version*	Multi-NIC Support	Free Space
PowerQuest	DR-DOS	Yes	343k
Altiris	MS-DOS	No	135k
Symantec	PC-DOS or MS-DOS	No	106k
StorageSoft	MS-DOS	No	251k

* Note that none of these tools provide MS DOS, but instead pull the files from a provided floppy or CD. This is obviously for licensing reasons, the question is what kind of licensing do you have for MS-DOS? A network with NT or 2000 would have none. It is a bit deceiving that it is not provided, but no warnings are displayed to you on your use of it. If you are deploying a PXE image or network wide usage of these boot files you could be in a major violation of Microsoft licensing.

Questions

If you have a question concerning a specific product or feature, please contact the companies directly or post a message to our network boot disk user forum.