The zip100 is not really needed at all if you have sprung for a DOS network stack, and have enough free xms for a huge ramdisk.

While it would make initial startup very slow and painful, the following process could be used with just xmsdsk, scandisk, and a nic, using a boot floppy:

Load patched (large mem aware) himem.sys

load xmsdsk

expand an initial payload toolkit .zip from the diskette into the ramdisk with pkunzip (contains scandisk, and the network stack)

Load the network stack

Mount the remote share

Copy a drivespace compressed volume file from the share to the ramdisk

Instruct scandisk to mount the compressed volume file with the undocumented (it's not mentioned in the command line help or windows documentation) '/mount' argument.

Make new command interpreter resident from the mounted ramdisk.

Drop to shell

One can FULLY network boot win98 this way, just make sure your msdos.sys file lists the correct data.

The ENTIRETY of a full win98se deploy can fit (with a teensy bit of room left over) inside a drivespace3 (with ultrapack on) compressed volume file that is about 384mb in size.

For actual lpt zip100 support from dos, there is the drivers the pcjr community use, that you might look into. On an xt, every kb counts, and the lpt on those machines is touchy.

Looks like that is the afore-mentioned palmzip.
https://peichl.leute.server.de/peichl/palmzipe.htm

(Has demo ver, and ordering info)

I thank you for your input. 😀 I was using the following method to boot the DOS laptop:
* Exit the Win98 computer to a DOS mode configuration that runs the network software.
* Insert the Zip disks into the drives.
* Start the laptop.
* Boot the laptop's system floppy.
* The floppy will then load the drivers and TSRs and, while doing that, mount the compressed portion of the floppy then copy it to a RAM disk.
* While running autoexec.bat, the local Zip disk will be mounted.
* When I get back the DOS prompt, I run a batch file that prepares the network and routes the network drives.

This old Win98SE computer had only 128MB RAM and limited hard drive space, so I use a Zip drive on that computer and have the RAM drive's contents compressed and decompress them while preparing the network.

BTW, the laptop mentioned here is missing, and the Win98SE computer was replaced. I believe I copied the network information off the old Win98SE computer, though. If I find the laptop again, I'd better get it a hard drive, but I like running through loops to get it working. If I do, I can keep the Zip drive to transfer large programs to the laptop.

BTW, I was using JAM to compress the laptop's drives and Stacker to compress on Win98SE.