Netdrive 1.3.4.0 Free Download
Sonya Schmiesing
mTCP NetDrive is a DOS device driver that allows you to access a remote disk image hosted by another machine as though it was a local device with an assigned drive letter. The remote disk image can be a floppy disk image or a hard drive image.
It's great if you need to mount/read install files from a remote location and don't want to copy them over first. In my 386 I only have a 330MB harddrive. Any CD based games or application I need to burn to a CD to be able to run/install. With this tool it can be done over the network.
appiah4: Obviously I'm a big fan of FTP. But in the DOS world things like file managers expect to use drive letters. You can use standard DOS commands (copy, xcopy, deltree) or run programs directly on the logical drive which is something you can't do with FTP. For machines like the PCjr there isn't even a local hard drive to copy files too.
Jo22: I've tested extensively on PC DOS. (MS DOS is covered by that.) I've tested lightly on FreeDOS. The device driver is not sophisticated because it has to be DOS 2.0 compatible, so if you have a DOS variant that claims to use the same device driver model then try it out. The only weirdness might be around the tiny RAM disk that I use to signal that nothing is connected; FreeDOS wasn't happy with it and other versions of DOS might not like it either.
Yoghoo: As pointed out already, just move the device driver around to get the drive letter that you'd like. The server side doesn't print the IP address, but you should be able to connect to it from DOS by name if you have DNS setup.
Vetz: I'm trying to keep the device driver as small and simple as possible. It also needs to be portable between the versions of DOS. A feature to reserve a drive letter might be possible, but also might require version dependent code. I'll look into it.
That doesn't work in (my?) case. The cdrom gets a drive letter in the autoexec.bat. So after the config.sys. I already put it all the way at the bottom of the config.sys but it always uses the first drive after the fixed disks. I like to use a drive letter after the cdrom. So like suggested earlier a parameter for the device driver which drive letter to use would be nice.
The technology used here does not support assignable drive letters. NETDRIVE.SYS is a standard DOS "block device driver". Each block device driver will provide one ore more partitions to DOS.The driver has no control over the drive letters, DOS just assigns them consecutively. Before interpreting CONFIG.SYS, an internal block device driver registers all DOS-type partitions on hard drives on the letters C:, D:, ..., and the first block device driver loaded will inevitably get the next letter after those partitions. If you need the NETDRIVE at a later letter, try using ASSIGN or SUBST to provide the letter of your choice.
I chose a device driver to keep things small and simple, which is the only way a 6KB device driver can work across all versions of DOS and still do some neat tricks. (Buffer space is about half of the driver.)
A TSR can choose to get a specific drive letter by messing with internal DOS data structures, but that is complicated and the code depends on which version of DOS you are using. A later version of this code could be packaged as a TSR, but right now it's a device driver.
This works nicely when not using a cd-rom driver. When using a cd-rom driver the netdrive.sys loads correctly but takes the drive from the already assigned cd-rom. And when it tries to mount the image with netdrive.exe it hangs after the packet driver is connecting. So this indeed confirms what mkarcher said above.
netdrive.sys didn't work, either. I tried to use devload, since I believe DOS Plus doesn't load DOS drivers (since it's CP/M-86 really).
Unfortunately, my copy of devload says it needs DOS 3 to 6. drvload says it needs DOS 3, too.
Of course, that's all too understanding. DOS Plus isn't a real DOS, after all.
But still, I felt like I have to test this. DOS Plus shipped with the Amstrad/Schneider PC1512 and PC1640.
So it used to be a very widespread DOS 2 compatible OS here in Europe.
Even though that MS-DOS 3.20 was also included, along with GEM.
I've heard that ImDisk from -toolkit/ is supposed to be good, but I've not used it myself. To seed my disks I've either been copying files directly from the local disk of a DOS machine or using pkzip and FTP to move a cluster of files. (Pkzip makes it easier to move a large batch as it preserves timestamps and directory structure.)
Netdrive.sys gets assigned a drive letter from DOS - it doesn't get to choose the drive letter. It's based on the order in which the built-in block device driver recognizes BIOS devices and the order of block device drivers in CONFIG.SYS. If you need it to appear at a specific drive letter, alter the order of block device drivers in CONFIG.SYS. Other ways to do it involve manipulating DOS internal structures after the boot is complete, but that would make the device driver either very large or specific to one version of DOS. It is possible, but not something that adds a lot of value compared to the rest of the driver.
Other features will come time permitting. Listing disk images is easier but I need to keep the size of the EXE small so that might have to be in a separate program that uses a TCP socket. Swapping floppies is an advanced feature because it's tricky to do; if DOS has the file open or if there are pending writes that the server doesn't know about you can cause corruption.
Do you know of any other windows tools that can make/manage a raw disk image to use with netdrive, or convert it to something 7z can use? I was wanting to avoid linux with this but winimage is clunky to use plus i dont own it, and osfmount somehow nuked my windows efi boot partition, that was fun. Though if i have to i could use linux to create the disk files for netdrive to use and then use other windows tools to manage it
Unfortunately I didn't find any other free Windows software which could mount the standard netdrive image files. There are some commercial products but I didn't test or buy them. Got a license for PowerISO but that one also didn't like the netdrive image files. Didn't have any issues with OSFMount so I am using that for now.
Thanks, I'm still new to this and certainly feel like a caveman bashing a keyboard with a rock atm. Ill give Imdisk a try before resorting to making files with linux or obtaining a copy of winimage. If anyones wondering about my issue with OSFMount i think its specific to older versions of windows 10, using LTSC so its v1809.
Kind of related, are there any programmers reading this who work in Windows or older versions of Windows? Finding DOS programmers is difficult, and I suspect that Windows people are equally hard to find.
Also dug a little deeper and found Arsenal Image Mounter ( ). Free for personal use. Tried it and works very well including creating image files. Think it will replace OSFMount for me. Needs .NET 8.0.2 though but will prompt and install automatically when running the program for the first time.
Arsenal's Image Mounter mounted my December's .dsk image without issue. I was able to copy something to it (adlib tracker 2, which I wanted to try).
I just had to remember to boot with a specific configuration from my boot menu, which enables network and which loaded NETDRIVE.SYS as a device.
Adlib tracker seemed to require more conventional memory which was in shortage with everything required for netdrive, so after a reboot, it also seemed to require CWSDPMI.EXE in its same folder in order to work.
After both problems sorted out, success!
Looking forward to mount several .img disk images that seem to be popular on archive.org, several at once.
What I used to use for working with disk images under Windows was mtools running under Cygwin. mtools is a collection of command-line tools, so you'd create a configuration file which says x: is a particular partition in a particular image file, and then type "mdir x:". If I recall correctly, with some effort I was able to get the MToolsFM GUI for mtools built and running on Windows too. This was probably about 15 years ago, not sure if it'd be easier or harder now ? Since it was just a Linux tool ported to Windows, maybe now that everyone has Windows Subsystem for Linux it's not such a big win over just using Linux tools?
Nie tylko, jak widzicie, w tym trudność, że nie zdołacie wejść na moją grę, lecz i w tym, że ja do was cały zejść nie mogę, gdyż schodząc, gubię po drodze to, co miałem donieść.
b1e95dc632