Persistent FreeDOS live USB

Question

This has been driving me crazy! I want to use FreeDOS as an OS, but I do not want to install it to my hard drive or use it in a virtual machine. I have been able to boot it by installing an image to my USB drive using Unetbootin and booting the USB drive through my BIOS, but I have not been able to find a way to add persistence to the Live USB.

Any thoughts on how to make a persistent, Live FreeDOS USB? Thanks...

Answer 1

Using unetbootin typically writes the partition using iso9660 format which makes it read-only. What you will want to do is use the FreeDOS USB image and write it to a USB using something like https://etcher.io and then using an older version of gparted (usually from an Ubuntu 14.04 live CD should be old enough), you can resize the FAT partition from the default image size up to fill the disk (or half the disk if you want to use it for multi-booting with grub4dos or something like that).

I've used this to create BIOS update USB drives and it is fantastic because I can easily copy and paste newer updates onto the USB without having to re-write the whole thing (which is usually required when using unetbootin or other tools to write an ISO to a USB).

Answer 2

You might also be able to boot from the Live CD/installation media and select the USB drive(which will be listed as a hard drive if this method would work).

You could potentially also install FreeDOS in a VM with a raw hard drive the same size(or slightly smaller) than your USB drive then use dd to copy the image over.