[Discuss] bundling FreeDOS

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Sat, Dec 7, 2013 at 5:53 PM, Tom Metro <tmetro+blu at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was updating the BIOS on a 2007-era motherboard yesterday.
>....
> Plan B was to use the vendor supplied flash utility that runs under DOS.
>  (Of course they also provide a Windows flashing tool but I wasn't about
> to install Windows (or find a live CD) just to update the BIOS.)
>....
>
> I found a simple guide for setting up a FreeDOS bootable USB Flash drive:
> http://www.chavers.us/robs-place-mainmenu-42/17-ubuntu-notes/46-easiest-way-to-create-a-usb-dos-boot-disk-using-linux

I use the memdisk program from syslinux along with my default grub
install to boot a DOS floppy disk image from my hard drive for this
purpose.  I  mount the floppy image using losetup (or the "-o loop"
option to the mount command) and copy whatever flash software I
currently want into the floppy image.   All I need to do then is
reboot the machine and select the floppy image entry from my grub
menu.   No external media required.   Here's a link to some info on
how to do that:

http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/MEMDISK#GRUB_and_GRUB4DOS

My grub entry is slightly different from that web page.   Here is what I use:

menuentry "Bootable floppy: dos" {
        insmod part_msdos
        insmod ext2
        set root='(hd0,msdos2)'
        search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root
e4ba3b39-21c9-4b1f-b7e7-c27e4584a12a
        linux16 /memdisk bigraw
        initrd16 /images/dos.img
}

/images is a subdirectory on my /boot partition.

Enjoy,
Bill Bogstad