> On Feb 5, 2025, at 12:19 AM, Ladislav Lacina via Freedos-devel > <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > I see. I downloaded "FD14-FullUSB.zip". > > So it means that FD14-FullUSB.zip is non-live but FD14-LiveCD.zip is live > distribution? >
Correct. Technically booting any of the FreeDOS release/install media provide you with a “live” running version of FreeDOS. However, only the LiveCD is configured to be used as Live OS. The BonusCD only contains packages and is not bootable. The other install media (Floppy Edition, LegacyCD, LiteUSB and FullUSB) are configured for the process of simply installing the OS. The reason the FullUSB is configured simply as an OS installation source is related to how various hardware handles Flash Drives and the Users intentions. It is not knowable wether the User is intending to install the OS to a hard disk drive or wants to simple run FreeDOS on/from the Flash Drive. Booting from a USB Flash Drive and using it as the DOS hard drive is problematic on some PC Hardware. While this is not an issue with most machines, some hardware boots from Flash Media in read-only mode. Any attempts to write to that drive result in serious issues for the Operating system. At this time, there is no way to know if the USB drive is writable or locked at boot. Therefore, the USB image is configured to assume the drive is locked and the user intends to install the OS to a internal hard drive. However, it is very easy to convert the FullUSB version into a usable installed portable version of FreeDOS on USB. Like the other large install media, the FullUSB contains a copy of the Floppy Edition installer under the FDOS-x86 subdirectory. Although the Floppy Edition installer is not as pretty and looks simple compared to the primary installer, in many ways, it is much more advanced. Unlike the primary installer, it is even capable of installing the OS from a subdirectory to the same hard disk. This is useful to easily turn the USB Stick into a portable FreeDOS install. 1) Write the Full USB image to a flash drive using a tool like DD on Linux, MacOS or BSD. 2) Optional… Use a tool like GParted to increase the size of the DOS partition on the USB media. 3) Boot the USB media. 4) Quit the main FreeDOS installer. 5) Change to the FDOS-x86 directory. 6) Run the Floppy Edition installer “setup.bat” 7) Since the USB Stick will be Drive C: and (by default) the Floppy Edition installer will select Drive C: as the install target, the default settings will be fine. However, it will detect that as DOS exists on Drive C:. You do not need to “Backup” the existing OS. So, you should tell it to skip making a backup of the existing OS. 8) After installation, Reboot. 9) Delete the Setup.bat file in the root directory. It was for the Primary installer and will no longer be functional. 10) You can delete the FDOS-x86 subdirectory to free some space. 11) The FullUSB still contains all the packages that are on the LiveCD and BonusCD. You can run FDIMPLES to install any of those packages. If you do not want to install any other packages, you can delete the PACKAGES directory to free a lot of space. 12) Have fun using your portable USB Stick version of FreeDOS. :-) Jerome
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