How to link 2 PC's within DOS?

[Felix]

Not sure wether this belongs here...

I've found an old Stink Pad CSE 360 from 1994 laying around. It still has Win 3.1 installed. It has a 486-DX2 with 12 MB RAM and a 328 MB hard drive (according to fdisk).

If operated at full tilt, the horsepower would just enable to run Win95. (well ok, not much more possible... :) ) However this could be fine for some lean applications.

There is a floppy drive, a hard drive, a serial and a paralell port available but no CD ROM drive. The setup process could be:
- boot from floppy
- fdisk and format
- load some sort of DOS network driver
- access the CD drive on a networked computer
- setup Win95.

There is a chance to do it with a PCMCIA LAN card and a DOS-to-Novell client.

However I think it's easier with a direct computer connection using a parallel port crossover cable. And now finally my question:

Where can I obtain some free software to link two computers within DOS, using parallel or serial port?

Any help is highly appreciated. TIA

Felix

[highrisemech]

It is easier to get a harddrive adapter then do the set up from your desktop.

[Felix]

the idea was: no cost. and no opening of the notebook case.

[David_Jones]

I am thinking about the same problem (in spare time).

My current direction of thought is to use the NETSTART command in Dos to create a network over the parallel cable.

This won't help you much, but I thought it might trigger some good ideas in someone else and we can move forward.

What is really annoying is that I'm sure I KNOW we used to do this regularly back around 1991 / 1992 before I had even seen a GUI interface such as Win2.0 / Win3.1 but I cannot remember what we did!

Thanks,

David.

[Felix]

I just tried it - and it worked fine! I took a PCMCIA NIC laying around. It comes also with netware drivers for DOS. Since we still run a netware 3.2 server, I hooked the NIC, copied the drivers according to the supplied readme file, started the drivers, and I was on the LAN. Copying went like a charm, and so did Win95 install afterwards. :)

NETSTART is definitely no DOS command. I checked the old DOS6.22 help files. Could it be that you used to use a "Netstart.bat" file which loaded the netware drivers?

The other possibility is Laplink V for DOS, but it costs. And it's slow (about 30kB/sec) compared to the LAN.

Hope this helps you a little further,

Felix

[bailey]

I have a old version of laplink that runs in dos, that would do what you want just fine

[David_Jones]

Hi Bailey,

Are you offering to let me have your copy? If so, that's very generous - thanks!

If you don't object, I'll send an email to your hotmail account with my postal address - my expense of course!

Apologies if I have misunderstood.

Thanks,

David.

PS: I have a parallel cable already - would I need any other hardware?

Alternatively, I have network cards and a Cat-5 crossover cable so hopefully one of those would work with Laplink?

[PCMASTER]

I have the floppy disk images for NETSTART if anyone wants them....