How to Create Bootable LIVE FreeDOS USB Drive

In the past we have posted about how you can create a bootable FreeDOS USB drive that can be used to install FreeDOS on any computer. But what if you want to have a bootable USB drive with FreeDOS already installed on it? Such a bootable USB drive might come handy if you want to run some DOS programs or play DOS based games on any PC that supports booting from USB drives. It is very easy to create a bootable live FreeDOS USB drive and you can follow these steps to create your own:

  1. Download and install Oracle VirtualBox in your PC from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads.
  2. In the VirtualBox, create a new virtual machine and install FreeDOS on it using the FreeDOS ISO image downloaded from http://www.freedos.org/download/ (use CD-ROM standard installer). For more instructions about how to install FreeDOS in VirtualBox, you can read http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/VirtualBox.FreeDOS Live USB Drive
  3. Install 7-Zip in your computer. Right-click on the virtual drive file that was used in VirtualBox for installing FreeDOS, choose 7-Zip → Extract to .. and extract the contents of this drive image to a folder.FreeDOS Live USB Drive
  4. Download and launch Rufus. Attach your USB drive to your PC, select this USB drive in Rufus. Use default options and select to Create bootable disk using FreeDOS. Then click on Start and it will make your USB drive bootable.FreeDOS Live USB Drive
  5. Now copy all the files that you extracted in step 3 to your USB drive. Choose to overwrite files when asked.

This is it. Now you have a bootable live FreeDOS USB drive. You can copy your games, programs and other things on this USB drive too. You can reboot your PC, press F12, select the USB drive as the device to boot from and you will be inside FreeDOS. You can play games and do anything you like from here.

2 comments

  1. Hi, thanks for the tutorial! I followed each step but in the .vmdk file I have 2 .gz files and a.tif files. Extracting them into the Rufus/dos pendrive doesn’ t replace any file (the pendrive just contains a LOCALE folder and even this last one doesn’t contain any .gz or .tif file)…
    I think I done everithing right, what could be the problem?

    1. How much storage volume you set for your virtual disk, I set it to just 500MB and can extract the vmdk into fdos folder, command.com, autoexec.bat etc. But when I set it to say, 2GB, it will be extracted into something else, like 1.fat, 2.fat.

Comments are closed.