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Boot image file on real hardware without floppy drive

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First post, by ntalaec

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I have an old computer with MS-DOS on it which does not have an internal floppy drive. I would like to boot a PC Booter image without using a floppy disk and I'm looking for an utility that can do it.
I know about this utility Flopper: http://www.oldskool.org/pc/flopper which does what I want but needs a floppy drive in order to extract some information about the system.

Is there any alternative? I remember an utility which was just an EXE file posted in a forum that did not require anything in order to boot the file but I'm not able to find it.

EDIT
Found! Mounting .IMAs/floppy images under DOS as virtual drives?
MOUNT ver. 1.55 by Simone Riminucci: MOUNT.ZIP 3,990 bytes.
Alternative: SHSUFDRV v1.02, SHSURDRV v1.11 by Jason Hood: fdrv-3.zip 99,339 bytes.

Reply 1 of 3, by wierd_w

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Needs a V20, or an 80186.

A more versatile option is to use syslinux's memdisk, at least for systems with cdrom or usb boot.

https://wiki.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php?title=MEMDISK

You can pass memdisk as a 16bit kernel image, with the disk image and image geometry data, passed as the initrd string and the kernel parameters string, respectively.

It can then be fired from a DOS prompt using something like LiLo.

The system will 'softboot' on the virtualized floppy, after the image has been copied into ram.

Reply 2 of 3, by ntalaec

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wierd_w wrote on 2026-09-12, 14:28:

Needs a V20, or an 80186.

Yes, I have noticed that.

wierd_w wrote on 2026-09-12, 14:28:
A more versatile option is to use syslinux's memdisk, at least for systems with cdrom or usb boot. […]
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A more versatile option is to use syslinux's memdisk, at least for systems with cdrom or usb boot.

https://wiki.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php?title=MEMDISK

You can pass memdisk as a 16bit kernel image, with the disk image and image geometry data, passed as the initrd string and the kernel parameters string, respectively.

It can then be fired from a DOS prompt using something like LiLo.

The system will 'softboot' on the virtualized floppy, after the image has been copied into ram.

I Googled this but don't find any binaries for DOS of MEMDISK and LiLo. Do you know any?

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