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.