Fresh install of freedos to sd card via ide to sd card adapter. If I try to boot from the sd card, I get "read error while reading drive". However, if I swap out the sd card with windows 98 install (also on sd card) it boots without issue. Also if I boot from the freedos install cd and then choose "boot from hard drive" it boots freedos fine.

Taking a look at the freedos sd card in Linux, it looks like there's an empty 4 megs at the beginning of the disk, then the rest is fat32, but with bootable flag enabled on the fat32 partition. Not sure why there is this empty 4 megs at the beginning, I started with a blank sd card.

How can I get freedos to boot without the cd?