Creation of a DOS BOOT floppy

If you have already a DOS Boot disk

Fine.
Just use it - Snapshot will run on any DOS.
Just copy SNAPSHOT.EXE to the disk and use it.

If you are using  Windows XP

You can create a DOS Bootdisk by formatting a floppy with the Option 'MS-DOS Bootdisk creation'.
Windows XP will create a floppy, containing a (very limited) subset of Windows ME.

If you have SNAPSHOT installed

Snapshot SETUP has created a shortcut in the start menu:

            Programs->Snapshot Disk Imaging->Create Disaster Recovery Disk.

Click this to create a bootable FreeDOS disk, including  PnP network access to your Windows server (see below).

If you bought the full version, you got a CDROM, which is bootable as well.
The booted CD is equivalent to the diskette above.

Properties:
        
Always supported are FAT16, FAT32 und ATAPI CD/DVD-ROMs (the CDROM-drive letter is W:).

Due to limited available memory, upon start up you have to select, if you additionally want to access local NTFS drives (for the image file location), or want to find the image files on the Windows Network.

International Keyboard support

When creating the recovery boot disk, Snapshot tries to detect the current keyboard layout (of Windows).
It then creates a file LANGUAGE.BAT on the bootdisk, that is executed during boot and holds the statement

        KEYB XX

where XX is the layout identifier to be loaded.

Currently detected are English (US), United Kingdom (UK), German (GR), Swiss German (SG), French (FR), Swiss French (SF), Portuguese (PO), Brazil (BR), Russia (RU), Bulgaria (BG), Belgian (BE), Dutch (NL), Finnish (SU), Swedish (SV), Italy (IT), Hebrew (HE), Norwegian (NO).
You can get a list of all supported layouts with 

        A:>KEYB /L

Bootdisk with PnP support for the Windows  Network/Samba

This Bootdisk is derived from Bart Lagerweij's  Bart's Network Boot Disk.

We changed it to be based on FreeDOS to avoid license issues.

This disk supports

• automatic detection of your network adapter 
• DHCP or static IP address
• TCP/IP or NetBEUI
• Saving Profiles to be available on next boot (only on diskette)

After starting the disk, you have to enter something like 

A:> NET USE   Z:   \\Servername\\Share

and restore the image files from Z:

Currently supported network adapters:

Note: the original network boot disk by Bart used Microsoft CABARC/EXTRACT tools to compress and maintain the drivers. Since 1.37 (November 2005) a different, better compression program, UHARC, is used. You can download the shareware version of UHARC here .

If you have a different Network adapter, see  More Network Drivers below.
You will find ~100 supported drivers, which unfortunately don't fit all on a floppy disk.
Just copy the required driver XXXCARD.UHA into A:\LIB\NDIS, and reboot.

We would like to hear from you, which drivers are missing; so we can place the most popular drivers immediately into the delivered package.

short note to support@drivesnapshot.de will do.
thanks.

NTFS Support for DOS

If your image files are located on a NTFS volume, DOS isn't able to access them by itself.

Sysinternals offers (besides a lot of other useful utilities) a  NTFSDOS driver for DOS; the read-only variant is free.

Please download NTFSDOS.EXE  and copy it to  A:\UTILS.

UDMA Support for DOS

Most motherboards don't support the fast UDMA mode for IDE drives in their BIOS; therefore Disk transfer speed in DOS is limited to ~8MB/sec, which results in a max.
possible restore rate of 5MB/sec.

Modern hard disks could have a transfer speed of 80 MB/sec and more, if accessed with UDMA.

UDMA will test its functionality, and will not load, if it doesn't find compatible hardware.
Unfortunately, the test causes some (very few) main boards to hang, so we can't load it automatically.

UDMA was developed by  Jack Ellis - thanks for that :))

More Network Drivers

Unfortunately not all existing network card drivers fit on a single floppy; here are ~100 more supported.
Just 
    download
    copy to a:\lib\ndis
    reboot

for the current version of the boot disk, use the .UHA download; older versions (before 15 nov 2005) require the slightly larger .CAB version