I know this has nothing to do with the modular disk's but i need some advice. im trying to create a gohst 8.0 boot disk. ghost is now 1.3x mb big. so theres the first work around, i've managed to get it to fit on a freedos disk, deleted the command.com and in the config.sys added shell=ghost.exe thats great it work and have space left. just want to add ctmouse ~4k and paralink ~7k (after upx) but how can i load them with out autoexec.bat file? if i have command.com wont have any space. heres what i got
-----
09/12/2002 09:55 PM 40,999 KERNEL.SYS
31/10/2003 09:40 PM 1,394,212 ghost.exe
14/08/2002 02:03 PM 7,299 paralink.com
02/05/2002 01:09 AM 4,898 CTMOUSE.EXE
19/11/2003 05:04 PM 60 config.sys
5 File(s) 1,447,468 bytes
0 Dir(s) 8,192 bytes free

A:\>type config.sys
FILES=85
BUFFERS=40,0
STACKS=9,256

SHELL=A:\GHOST.EXE
-----

not alot of space to play around with. and i dont feel like making a non-standard disk size for it to fit. any ideas?

DEVICE=A:\CTMOUSE.EXE
INSTALL=A:\paralink.com

I think that's it. Been a while.

nope :/ get an error with both lines in freedos. i looked around and it seem that its the right command *i think* but still gets error, hmm wonder if there's a replacment command.com or somthing else i could use. got about 8k to work with unless theres a smaller "kerenl" bootdisk, freedos use's ~41k for its kernel.sys

Ghost has grown a lot! I remember it taking 600KB or so, not 1.3MB..

have you tried the tool UPX (upx.sf.net) to compress your files (and thus make more space available)? The freedos kernel is already compressed by default.

be sure to have the latest version (2032a-FAT32) of it.

install=a:\ctmouse.exe
install=a:\paralink.com
shell=a:\ghost.exe

don't know about a tiny CMD replacement unfortunately.

allready tryed it, ghost cannot be compressed and already compressed ctmouse and paralink, the "install=" *should* work but it use's command.com to execute. only problem is that I dont have a command.com. i think this is disk is not possible with out useing 82 tracks or a custom disk size which i dont want to do :/

only option though is to create a non-standard disk.
DMF maybe. use WinImage for it.

yeah thats what im trying to stay away from, its fine loading a 2.88mb image from a cd, but for not having the cd it would be nice to get it to fit on 1 standard disk

How about playing it the "modboot" way?

Use a barebone modboot disk and create your own cab
containing your Ghost.exe and put that in Level0 so it
will auto-unpack to your ramdisk. Ghost.exe in a CAB
should gain space enough for this approach.

Erwin

the file is compressed as much as possible. zip/rar'ing it wont do much if anything , I tryed it and didnt do much, and dont feel like making it into a multi-disk, if only there was a super small command like interpiter. i guess i could try jsut switching to a mouse.sys but still wouldn't help lpt support

For my NetWare version of the network boot disk, NwDsk, I gained
substantial space by first decompressing all of Novell's NLMs and
then compressing them with "cabarc LZX:21" into a CAB. I also do
that with all other utilities I use for my disks. With small files the
gain is almost pathetic I must admit, but with bigger files it can just
make the difference.
But you are probably right that this might not work since you need
to gain enough to add also a ramdisk and extract.exe to your diskette...

Erwin

Just wondering if anyone ahs thought of an awsner to this problem yet? The only thing i can think of is just taking lpt support out, or if there was a mini command line interprater that doesn't have anything in it.

hey i dont think you're gonna use a 1.44 mb floppy to boot that right ??

so if you intend to make a image, why not make it a 2.88 image ? also if it still dosent fit then get some bigger images from reanimatologs site.. !

That shud get you goin..

Let me know if that helps,

Bye,
Jassi

EDIT :- DUH ! ok sorry i blew that off, dint read the post correctly..

ok look once i was stuck in such a sitution too... ok look read carefully, theres a app known as SmartFormart by Vinai Pai, the features of his app are, :-

You can get it from http://members.tripod.com/ieeecrce/innovat...ions99/tformat/

SmartFormat Features

Salient features of SmartFormat 2.1
Format disks even if they have bad sectors on track zero
Format standard 1.44 MB disks for 1.72 MB using standard hardware (Almost 20% gain in capacity). This is achieved without any kind of data compression.
No drivers or TSRs need to be installed
Verify-Only option for previously formatted floppies speeds up format by about 60%
Wipe-Only option serves to quickly and easily clear disks of their contents, even if there are multiple sub-directory levels and errors like cross-linked files and lost clusters.
Disks formatted with SmartFormat have less bad (unusable) space than when formatted with DOS or Windows.
Rather than the unintelligible hexadecimal numbers used by other format programs for disk serial numbers (like 1B2C-19F4), SmartFormat uses the date and time. For example, a disk formatted at 11:35 PM on 15th September has serial number 2335-1509.
User friendly interface. Fully descriptive and easy to understand error messages.


OK so u see, u can format your standard floppy into a 1.72 MB one, and believe me it ROCKS ! have had no problems with the compatibility !

Try it once !,

Bye,
Jassi

Yeah i'v looked into that, its kinda the last ressort. i want to try to stay with the standard 1.44mb just for compatiblity with program and i deal alot with ibm system and especialy there laptops are picky as hell. with jo.sys in windows there will be no a: or will have issues. with bootscript anytime it try's to seek a: it will hang. even if you dont boot of the cd and just let it boot from the hdd it will still have issues. as for the disk size some programs like vpc or vmware wont alow you to mount gloppy img unless 1.44 or 2.88 so trying to find away around it. on my old cd's i just had the exe in dir on the /bin/ghost/ghost.exe and mod'd my config.sys/autoexec to call it as the shell but want to get it so its completly independet from disk <-> cd. I guess the only other thing is have ghost 8 only on cd and ghost 7 on bootable disk. hmm....

I've had the same problem, so I took the easy way out: Since I'm usually Ghosting drives up to a server anyway, I keep a copy of GHOST.EXE on the server. I just use the Modboot disk to start the network on the PC and then map to the server I'm going to Ghost to, and launch Ghost from there.

You could also use Bart's Corporate Modboot CD to do this.