Bolster Your DOS USB Boot Disk – Part 1

Yesterday, I walked through how to make your own DOS USB boot disk with the final result being a bootable USB stick that won’t do much more than let you browse the USB stick itself and other internal FAT and FAT32 drives.

Today, we’ll make that USB stick a bit more useful.

The first and easiest thing to do is to copy all of all the DOS files that we extracted yesterday to C:\DOS (or wherever you copied them) to the USB stick. There should be 31 items in the folder (including the CDROM folder at the top).

DOS Files

Copy all of the files and the folder to your bootable USB stick. You will get a few warnings about file conflicts like the one below:

File Conflict Warning

You’ll encounter three such warnings and for each one your should click “Skip” for each one (or the option to decline overwriting each file if the options differ from above). Once completed, you’ll have a DOS boot disk that can now access your optical drives.

In Part 2, we’ll get your bootable USB stick to recognise your other USB devices (like external hard drives, other USB sticks and card readers) – so stay tuned!