NetDrive is a DOS device driver that allows you to access a remote disk image hosted by another machine as though it was a local device with an assigned drive letter. The remote disk image can be a floppy disk image or a hard drive image.
↫ Michael B. Brutman
An incredibly useful tool for modern-day DOS work.
Network Attached Storage for DOS. How cool is that?
There was lots of software at the time to mount network drives, such as lantastic. Network storgae was a very common use case for businesses. However I don’t recall anything doing virtual disks. Not sure why someone would need this. I’d rather use a network file system than mount virtual disks.
It’s interesting, but since dos typically gets emulated this days, I think it would be better to use virtual disk support in the emulator itself. Running it as a DOS device driver uses precious conventional DOS RAM whereas implementing it in the emulator does not.
Alfman,
Novell Netware had virtual disks. We used them for network booting from diskless DOS clients. It was even possible to load Windows 3.1 with them (but not sure about Windows 95).
Though as you said, it would limit available memory. Don’t remember the details, but I think you’d remove the virtual floppy from RAM, after loading IPX and netware drivers and mounting another volume. (It has been a while)