What you have to do is to prepare a USB drive with the Ubuntu installer and boot from it instead of booting into FreeDOS. – Andrea Corbellini Oct 16 '13 at 13:46 @AndreaCorbellini Wine doesn't install Windows, it's a Windows emulator. Thank you to everyone who responded. I recently got back to this project after another project. I believe that the issue with using a CD to install the OS after erasing the hard disk is due to the PC being a modern PC and the CD based FreeDOS install using an old CDROM driver as described at.
I need to install [minimal] FreeDOS in a machine already running Linux, without a CD drive. I already have another FAT32 target partition.
I've already runned 'sys-freedos-linux' but it just installs the bootsector and says I have to copy KERNEL.SYS and COMMAND.COM files mannually. Where do I find those files (freedos iso has only KERNEL16.SYS and KERNEL32.SYS files)? Do I place them at root? Is this ALL I need to boot into a basic FreeDOS installation (I just need it in order to initialize an WinNT installation...)
2 Answers
As I understand it, you want to boot FreeDOS using GRUB from your Linux installation.
You might find this helpful: http://hype-free.blogspot.de/2008/12/booting-freedos-with-grub.html
Windows 10 Usb Installer
Perhaps you don't have the newest version of the FreeDOS ISO. The file kernelx.zip on version 1.1 of the ISO contains KERNEL.SYS (and commandx.zip contains COMMAND.COM). Just copy these files to the root of the partition. This should work provided you already have:1) FreeDOS boot loader in the boot record of the target partition (which will load KERNEL.SYS). I guess 'sys-freedos-linux' installed this.2) Some boot loader in the master boot record of the disk (which loades the FreeDOS boot loader). This can be GRUB, the default DOS MBR code or something else. It might require the target partition to be marked as bootable to work.
Since you have to craft your own DOS partition like this I assume you lack the possibility to install from either floppy or CD on the target machine. Another alternative (which might even let you skip the step of booting DOS to begin with) is to make the installation using VirtualBox (to the target disk directly or to an image you can write to the target disk).
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Is it possible to install Ubuntu from FreeDOS? The machine does not have an optical drive, so I'm assuming I'll be able to install via memory stick. If so, what are the system requirements?Thanks!Chris
1 Answer
According to this wiki page, Ubuntu Desktop editions needs:
- 700 MHz processor (about Intel Celeron or better) 512 MiB RAM (systemmemory)
- 5 GB of hard-drive space (or USB stick, memory card or4
- external drive but see LiveCD for an alternative approach) VGA capable
- of 1024x768 screen resolution Either a CD/DVD drive or a USB port for
- the installer media Internet access is helpful
Also, the system should be able to boot from the USB drive. (One can't install Ubuntu from FreeDOS, at least not easily)
How To Install Freedos
But the best way to be sure is to try it (after the Ubuntu .iso is downloaded, it takes only a few minutes to create a Live USB)
