tevoy

If you end up going with a bootable CD you might consider ISOLinux. It is able to launch dos based sessions and you could customize several for whatever you are trying to do. It is possible to allow the Boot CD to default to your local hard drive so after a suitable timeout it would just boot normally. What I have done in the past is use a machine with a floppy to get the boot disks the way I want them. Then using Winimage convert the floppies to diskette images adjusting the size of the floppy to 2.88 and injecting any required files if necessary. ISOLinux will manage the enviroment launching into your customized dos session. Have a look at http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/ section titled OEM CD-ROM disc builder assistant

You can try Aefdisk. It is a command line shareware util which handles partitoning and file formatting. I have used PowerQuest Drive Image Pro to run scripts from the dos rescue disk set environment. You need the pro version (corporate) which supports scripting. Retail versions lack this feature. Think it was version 5.5 or greater that had this. Also as previously stated gdisk. But you will have to invoke the 'convert' utility to move from fat32 to NTFS.

I've used DBAN for a couple of years now. It gives a choice of several protocols to wipe the disk including DOD and RCMP flavours. The one thing it is not is fast. I usually set up the wipe sessions to go overnight using a minimum 3 passess.

If you could use ftp, the files are located at: ftp.nai.com/commonupdater/ Note /commonupdater/ is a hidden folder. This is the site Enterprise 7 and 8 are defaulted to for their updates.

I have used several different approaches to this over the past couple of years. I run a mixed Windows/Linux lan at home and office. 1) My SMC Barricade router came with a built in print server. I abandoned this quickly as the internal memory was not sufficient for large print jobs. Word processing docs were fine but large graphics jobs seem to get lost. 2) I am currently using a dedicated print server from StarTech. It is an older model supportting only parellel port printers. I grabbed it for $C25.00 on a discount shelf. Found the drivers on a support page in the UK. Newer models are available. At work I use a HP170x. IP printing works like a charm from all W2K and XP computers. 3) My Brother Laser is currently attached to an old 400mhz CPU, running a linux distro called SME Server 6.5rc1. If you know a little bit about networking you can have this up and running on an old machine in under an hour. The only catch is ensuring the nic card is recognized. This version is based on Redhat 7.3 and so are the hardware restrictions. Version 7 Alpha1 is out based on Centos 4.1 (RHEL4). Don't let linux throw you off. You administer this from your browser once the initial setup is done and seldom have to venture in any linux specifics again. You also get file sharing, ftp (turned off by default), DHCP service if your lan requires it. Private or pulbic server, can act as a gateway/firewall. Check out www.contribs.org for more details. One last note; SME Server overwrites the entire harddrive on the host computer to create a dedicated server. Hope this helps.