FreeDOS - how i installed FreeDOS 1.0 with only a few floppy disks and a usb drive.

Installing FreeDOS normally is quite easy compared to MS-DOS. just insert the live CD and for the most part just follow the on-screen instructions.

But i had a problem a few years back when i decided to install freedos on my IBM Thinkpad 600E with its 400Mhz P2 and 224MB ram. The dvd drive was as dead as a doorknob.

But somehow i did it. and how i did starts with a special FreeDOS floppy i put together.


Ram disk, floppy disk.

Once upon a time, that thinkpad had windows 2000 on it. with an NTFS partition. so i wasn't exactly in a good place to actually setup freedos on it.

What i ended up doing at first is i took SRDISK and unzip and a freedos boot floppy to make a basic ramdisk of a very minimal freedos setup. (this is important later)

This ramdisk, once booted, is crazy-fast. and most importantly i can swap the floppy disk while its running. and even load extra zip archives off floppy disks into the ramdisk.

What this has to do with installing freedos.

So, with the help of my trusty ramdisk floppy, when i went to install freedos, i did the formatting, set aside an extra partition for a second os if needed, and installed a bootloader.

Problem: how am i supposed to get the utilities and such on this thing?
This computer only has a hard drive and a floppy drive to boot from. and out of the box that's all FreeDOS off a floppy disk sees, but it /does/ have a single usb port.

So. i took the packages off the freedos 1.0 iso and bundled then into 1 zipped filetree along with some other things, and put them on a usb drive. One floppy disk with usb drivers later and i copied the zip into ram. extract it to the freedos partition and after some tweaking everything went smoothly from there.

The ramdisk might not have been necessary, but i had already made it a bit before deciding to install freedos on that thinkpad, so i figured having a bit of extra workspace would help.