Anthology of Interest

It is sometimes necessary, even in this day and age, to use DOS or some other simple operating system to directly access hardware to perform tasks such as BIOS upgrades. Floppies, the traditional boot media for quick and dirty tasks such as this, are almost extinct. CD's are cumbersome to use and change. It is therefore handy to use some other portable external bootable media for jobs such as this. Enter the bootable USB key.

FreeDOS is a handy open source alternative to MS-DOS, but it only comes as a CD image that must be burned to a CD and then installed to a hard drive in order to be usable. This makes it a bit cumbersome to install on a USB key.

I took a somewhat circuitous route to arrive at these instructions, which included installing FreeDOS in a VMware Fusion virtual machine, copying that virtual disk to a flat image file, moving that image file into a Ubuntu virtual machine, byzantine manipulations of a USB flash drive with dd, and learning more about FAT and MBR than I ever wanted to know. Hopefully the distilled instructions below are a little easier.

I assume that you have a Linux capable of running QEMU (there is a version of QEMU for OS X). You don't need to use QEMU... but it makes it easier to try different things are repeat the process while still doing other things, since you don't have to reboot all the time.

1. Download the FreeDOS installer ISO from FreeDOS.org.
2. Partition your USB flash drive as you please. You should have at least one FAT32 primary partition on which you will install FreeDOS.
3. Run qemu-launcher. Set it to boot from CD-ROM, and set the CD-ROM path to point to the FreeDOS ISO you just downloaded. Set hard disk path to point at the raw flash device (something like /dev/sdb... find out from dmesg).
4. Launch qemu. It should boot the FreeDOS installer. Install FreeDOS on the "hard drive". I recommend installing just the base set of packages, unless you want to experiment with networking, etc in FreeDOS.
5. If you don't need multiboot, you are done.
6. Close QEMU, unplug the flash drive, and try to test it on a real system. If you have trouble, like it says that no OS is found, it may be necessary to run QEMU again in the same way as before, except instead of using the installer, use the live CD and run fdisk /mbr and sys c: to make sure the drive is fully bootable.

If you want to use multiple OS's on the flash drive, then you can install grub and set it up to boot each one. But that's for a later post...

but is thinking that one of the drivers you are cheering for just died entertainment?

Urgh. Yay safety innovation. Concussion and a sore (broken?) ankle. Wow.

Crashes are entertaining when you don't know who is involved, but it's pretty dramatic when it happens to someone you are cheering for. Which is part of watching sports I guess... experiencing the lows is just as much a part of it as the highs. Of course you alway want more points and less crashes in that case.

Montreal was perhaps the most entertaining race of the season, and that's because a lot of unexpected stuff happened, not because anyone drove particularity well.

Short track speed skating is entertaining because it's fast, and sometimes there are spectacular crashes. Riding in a velodrome is no different....

Dumb passing maneuver by #3.