Direct cable connection

Sorry if this is the wrong newsgroup.

We are trying to achieve the following:.

Our client brings in large volumes of used pc's that have been networked.
We need to be able to boot the client machines in dos mode and make the
drives available on a win XP machine via a serial/parallel connection.
We then interrogate the client machine and audit the installed software and
create some reports etc.
The client machine have various types of partitions therefore the bootable
dos disk needs to recognise the various formats.

Any help or pointers appreciated.

Steve

"Steve Warburton" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> Our client brings in large volumes of used pc's that have been networked.
> We need to be able to boot the client machines in dos mode and make the
> drives available on a win XP machine via a serial/parallel connection.

DOS6.0, 6.2, or 6.22. Use DOS's InterLink.

> The client machine have various types of partitions therefore the bootable
> dos disk needs to recognise the various formats.

DOS only reads FAT16, DOS from Win98 will read FAT16 & FAT32. Utility
called NTFSDOS (or somthing like that will let DOS read NTFS). No DOS of any
kind will read NTFS, Novell, or Linux/Unix partitions.

Easier way,...take the drives out, place them in a Windows 2000 machine as a
D drive and just "have at it".

--

Phillip Windell [MCP, MVP, CCNA]
www.wandtv.com