How to boot from floppy/CD without physical drive

Filed Under Howto, Linux

All new computers do not have FDD (Floppy Disk Drive) and even you find one it could be rally hard to find good media.

As remedy to this you could still boot from a CD

But sometimes you even do not have CD/DVD drive.

And then you need to boot from floppy to update your BIOS.

So what to do?

Do not run to your basement looking for floppies. There is another way. You can use grub and syslinux.

First you need Linux installed (OR probably you already have it). Examples here are for Ubuntu.

Next step is to install needed software:
sudo aptitude install syslinux

Then download a floppy image:
http://www.allbootdisks.com/downloads/Disks/MS-DOS_Boot_Disk_Download47/Diskette%20Images/Dos6.22.img

Then mount the image:
sudo mount Dos6.22.img /mnt -o loop

You can remove everything except:

After that in case of upgrading BIOS you need to copy new bios file and flash program.

Finally we will prepare the boot image.
sudo cp /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk /boot/ sudo cp Dos6.22.img /boot/

Reboot and on grub screen press c and boot the image using:
root (hd0,0) kernel memdisk initrd Dos6.22.img

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