Looking for some DOS software

[Tripredacus]

I am responsible for updating our universal USB drives. I got this responsibility because we used to have a bunch of floppies and USB drives for different BIOS updates and GHost methods. I decided to take all of these and build a single USB drive to handle everything. These devices we call Super Ghost. They can do BIOS updates for 30+ boards, load Ghost for a dozen different NICs, has DOS tools like Format, Attrib, etc and also has a mode to support NTFS in DOS. Originally I used "Windows 98" DOS files which are created when you do a bootable format with Windows 2003 or XP. At some point we came across the inability to load an NDIS driver for the Realtek 8111 series NIC, and this was because it required DOS 7.1 files. I had rebuilt the entire system using DOS 7.1. The menu system is primarily driven by the CONFIG.SYS (in order to be able to load different drivers) and batch files.

While the CONFIG.SYS menu option supports submenus, the batch files menus are driven by using CHOICE.COM, which has a maximum limit of 9 choices. For example, if we want to update the BIOS for an Intel board, we go to that menu, but there is a maximum of 9 options. If a new board is to be added, we drop off one of the boards that isn't in production anymore. Normally this is a fine enough but now there is a problem. We have 11 Intel boards in production!

In an effort to make these USB Keys user friendly, I need to rebuild it once again to handle these extra choices. I suppose one option is to redo the entire thing using the CONFIG.SYS supermenu options, but then I remember old DOS GUI programs. Are these any of these programs out there that I can use to build a menu with? Or any tutorials on how to create a GUI in DOS? I suppose again that a further option could be to put WFW on these things... that would be really weird...

Any ideas?

[Ponch]

You can check USB_multiboot_10 from the "Install XP from USB" forum. I has a possibility of booting DOS with multiple sub choices and also booting floppy images, so directly puting the constructor's floppy image on your stick.

You need XP to build the drive but you do not have to copy the XP part on it.

[jaclaz]

There are several "old style" menu programs.

Here are a few, choose one:

http://www.pc-tools.net/dos/pwrmenu/

http://short.stop.home.att.net/freesoft/menu.htm

http://saliu.com/menu.html

http://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/menu.html

Personally (but it is just a matter of tastes) I would go with MOO:

http://short.stop.home.att.net/freesoft/menu.htm

MOO — Mouse compatible menu; auto configuration, network, and password features.

* * * *

A top pick, especially for network use. Moo is a well designed menu program with network and Windows 3.x awareness. Notable features include mouse support, pulldown menus, automatic menu creation option, network/security features, and memory usage options (memory resident vs. non-memory resident program launching).

as it has some security features to restrict access to some operations.

Site is down, get it here:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://member...4/dos/moo31.zip

jaclaz

[DigeratiPrime]

I've been meaning to investigate the feasibility and hopefully implement BIOS updating via WinPE. I know Intel provides automated installers for its motherboards which simplifies things, but for the other manufacturers (AMI and AWARD) I planned to dump the BIOS ROMs and use a cmd line tool with cvars for flashing. I am planning on creating a HTA menu and maybe some logic for identifying and selecting the correct ROM file automatically. Its a different approach but I think we share the same problem. It would be convenient for me to have my partitioning scripts, image files, and bios updates all from the same environment and menu, easy to maintain/update, and conveniently loaded via PXE.

[Tripredacus]

So far, only MSI and Intel (from boards I've use) have 16 bit Flash updaters and AOpen is the only 32bit flash app. Does Intel at least make a Windows flash update program?

[Tripredacus]

There are several "old style" menu programs.

Here are a few, choose one:

http://www.pc-tools.net/dos/pwrmenu/

http://short.stop.home.att.net/freesoft/menu.htm

http://saliu.com/menu.html

http://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/menu.html

Personally (but it is just a matter of tastes) I would go with MOO:

http://short.stop.home.att.net/freesoft/menu.htm

MOO — Mouse compatible menu; auto configuration, network, and password features.

* * * *

A top pick, especially for network use. Moo is a well designed menu program with network and Windows 3.x awareness. Notable features include mouse support, pulldown menus, automatic menu creation option, network/security features, and memory usage options (memory resident vs. non-memory resident program launching).

as it has some security features to restrict access to some operations.

Site is down, get it here:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://member...4/dos/moo31.zip

jaclaz

I tried about 7 different ones. Some weren't user friendly, and the 2 I did get to work didn't like launching Intel's BIOS updaters. Usually exited with a file not found error. MOO ended up working just fine. I'll be using that one!