Wednesday 7 February 2018

Adding Dos programs and utilities to E2B

If you have a DOS (FreeDOS or MS-DOS, etc.) floppy disk image (.ima or .img), you can just directly add it to the E2B drive and it should boot correctly.

If you want to be able to modify the contents, you can use a program like WinImage, or you could convert the image to a FAT32 .imgPTN file.

Using the E2B FreeDos image

E2B includes a FreeDOS disk image as \_ISO\DOS\MNU\Freedos288.IMA.gz.

If you boot to this, you can access and run small DOS programs directly from the E2B drive because the FreeDOS image also loads an NTFS driver and support (sort of!) for long-filename for FAT32.



  1. Copy your DOS programs\files to the E2B USB - e.g. make a new folder called \MyDOS
  2. Boot to E2B and run the DOS - FreeDos menu entry to boot to FreeDOS
  3. type cd \MyDOS to change to the MyDOS folder on the E2B drive
  4. Now type the name of the DOS executable to run it.
Note: Previous versions had only 310K of conventional memory available. E2B v1.98e now has 530K of conventional memory free.

If some programs do not run due to the NTFS driver consuming too much conventional memory or if you do not want the NTFS driver loaded, you can download the FreeDos_FAT32_38MB.imgPTN.zip or FreeDos_FAT16_10MB.imgPTN.zip file from the Alternate Download Areas.

You will need to copy your DOS files to the partition image so that it is accessible from FreeDOS.
You can read more details on the E2B DOS page.

Note that FAT16 .imgPTN files do not work correctly with SWITCH_E2B.exe, so you must use the E2B menu to select FAT16 .imgPTN files.

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