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We’ve all been there. Or you are there right now if you’re reading this. Some manufacturer still believes it is 1995, and we all have a floppy drive laying around. I mean, I do have a stack of floppy drives, but that is not the point! I tried like 10 tutorials today trying to get a simple install of FreeDOS onto a flash drive with the BIOS update I needed. This is the only one that worked for me!

http://manual.aptosid.com/en/bios-freedos-en.htm

However, I’m going to modify and restate what they said for my own notes, and maybe for yours.

First, you need to know which drive letter your USB stick is. Head over to /dev before putting in your USB stick.

cd /dev
ls

We are looking specifically for things starting with “sd”. You should definitely have at least “sda”. That is your first SATA/SCSI hard drive. Anything like “sda1″ is a partition. We are only concerned with full devices for now.

Plug your drive in, and run “ls” again.

Now you should have a new “sd” entry. Remember this! We’ll assume it is /dev/sdb for this tutorial.

We need to reformat the drive, so if you have anything on it, back it up! This assumes you just have one partition, and it is not formatted as MSDOS right now. If you have issues, view the original tutorial for a more indepth guide to repartitioning your flash drive.

sudo mkfs.msdos /dev/sdb1

To install, we are going to use the virtualization tool qemu. Install like so:

sudo apt-get -y install qemu

And we need the FreeDOS CD image to install. Grab it from here:

FreeDOS Base CD

Or (if the above link breaks)

FreeDOS Download Site

Now, let’s boot FreeDOS!

sudo qemu -hda /dev/sdb -cdrom fdbasecd.iso -boot d

At that point, hit 1 to start installation, and follow the prompts to fully install it. Check the tutorial for a more indepth walkthrough.

Finally, download whatever files you need to flash the BIOS (or whatever else you want to do), and copy them to the root of the drive. You should be able to boot and follow the manufacturer’s instructions to flash the BIOS! Awesome!

About Josh Gachnang

Josh Gachnang is a small business consultant with 5 years of experience in developing IT systems. His specialties include moving IT infrastructure to the cloud, standard and mobile web development using Python and Django, and promoting with social media. Tips