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Quick and Dirty (Free)DOS Bootable USB Drive Under Linux

I found myself needing to flash a BIOS today, which required a DOS or Windows 98 bootable floppy disk.  Forget that.  Let’s use a USB drive instead!

Googling around returned methods that seemed way too involved for what I was trying to do.  Here’s the three commands I ended up using:

wget http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/autogen/FDOEM.144.gz
gunzip FDOEM.144.gz
sudo dd if=FDOEM.144 of=/dev/sdb

Be sure to change /dev/sdb to whatever your USB drive shows up as. (Disclaimer: I’m not responsible if you end up nuking your secondary hard drive)

Then unplug the drive and plug it back in.  Unzip your files onto the drive (mine shows up as /media/FREEDOS), eject, and flash away!

You’ll end up with about 1.3 MB of free space on the drive, which should be enough for the majority of things.

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