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Well, if you're going through the trouble of making a RAM disk and copying the files from the floppy onto the RAM disk, you could just as easily have a big { zip | tgz | tar.bz } archive on the disk, then extract it onto the RAM disk.
Erp, SirDice already said waht I just said, silly me. You could probably squeeze a few more bytes out of the disk by using a .tar.bz and a custom compilation of bzip that only unzips. Really, though, things generally don't compress twice. Disk compression *might* get you a few bytes by compressing the extraction program, but that's about it. Disk compression will probably not make a .zip file any smaller.
If you have net access, you could suck down some data from a server somewhere else...
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DOS 6.2 had features called dblspace and drivespace that could be used to make compressed floppies and disks - since you're trying to field ghosted systems it should'nt matter that the PC first uses something like a dos 6.2 boot disk... I'm not sure what the max size floopy might be though or if it exists in the DOS flavor that comes on win boxes now.. maybe you might want to explore this ?
.. cheyana
