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Creating a DOS Boot Menu

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by jasonbis 1 view

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This may not be the best place to post it but hopefully someone has an answer for me. Here is the situation. We currently have dos batch files on a cd that contain our network card drivers for all the different desktops and laptops for the company. We have ghost images stored on network file servers for all the machines. When we need to image a machine, we use our dos boot cd, select from the dos menu depending on what type of system we are using and it loads the NIC drivers so we can access the file servers and begin downloading the image. This cd works fine as long as you don't have more than 10 choices. The DOS menu only work with 1-9. It is based on one key only and to get 10 you would actually get number 1. What we need is a new menu that we can put more options on. I have been looking at a program called BartPE Builder in conjuction with Bootable CD Wizard but it looks like it wants image files and not batch files. We already have everything all set up in batch files and would like to keep them. I imagine instead of numbers we could use letters or something but it would be nice to come up with something better than that. Maybe even develop some type of GUI. Does anyone have any suggestions? Hopefully I explained this good enough. If not, post a question and I will be glad to clarify. Thanks.

10 replies

by thechas

Have you thought about setting up cascading menus with the present batch file system?

You could group your images,
Select a group,
Then select the specific image.

That would give you up to 100 options.

Chas

by jasonbis

Automenu doesn't appear to be what I need. That scans your hard drive and creates a menu for each program I have installed. Since we have many different machines with many different network cards, I need a boot disk that gives me the option to choose which machine I am trying to boot with so it loads the correct NIC driver and allows me to get to my file servers on the network that hold my ghost images. I currently have a boot disk that does this but it is using batch files and has a menu that only goes from 1-9 using the cchoice DOS command. I am sure I could change the numbers to letters and have many more options but I would like to use something that has a more friendly user interface and possibly graphical.

I am not quite sure what you mean about grouping images. We have all our images stored on a file server on the network. I want to take a blank hard drive, put in a machine, boot off a cd that contains the NIC drivers for that machine so I have network access in DOS, and from there I can get to Ghost and my network images. Like I said earlier, I have a disk that will do that but it is limited to 10 options and I would like to have something more graphical that the DOS command prompt for the boot menu.

by willcomp

There were several small, simple DOS menu programs that should do what you desire. Would have a "prettier" interface as well.

I used a registered shareware one (Easy Access) for years. You manually configure it's menu choices.

Send me a private message.

Dalton

by jasonbis

Thanks for everyone's help but we just decided to use letters instead of numbers and it works ok for now. We may pursue something fancier in the future.

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