I have a machine who’s mission is to run FreeDOS. It will do this most of the time, but sometimes it would be nice to be able to get it connected to a modern network to transfer DOS files out to my ‘production machine’ If DOS is like Windows the system clock ticks local time, but usually Linux likes UTC time - so this may be an issue that needs resolving too.
If it counts for anything, my old Dell B130 has absolutely no problems booting from a USB floppy drive (IBM model USB floppy drive), not even any issues swapping disks.
My dedicated machine ignores disk swap on 2 of the 3 USB drives I have. The third one seems to be ok though.
Huh, interesting. I only ever had the IBM drive that was given to me by an old friend, guess I lucked out on that.
When I bust out the floppy drive, I’m usually tinkering with my custom MS-DOS/Micro Windows 3.11 dual floppy build I call WinFlop. The Windows disk is bootable by itself, but if booted from the MS-DOS Diagnostic disk first, that has all the fun storage drivers for CD-ROM, USB and even NTFS (yes, NTFS4DOS even works in Windows 3.11 haha!)
WinFlop: https://youtube.com/watch?v=wv5ymx22wtM
But the last disk image I wrote to floppy was for KolibriOS, and I gotta say, that’s an absolutely amazing project! If you get some free time, I think you’ll appreciate trying it out as well…
KolibriOS: https://youtube.com/watch?v=YsYsW4sDpd8