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.

This entry was posted in Software. Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>