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How do I boot MS-DOS (or the Windows 98 boot disk) using my USB drive?

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This FAQ applies to: Any version.

Sometimes, you need to start up using MS-DOS (specifically, the Windows 98 boot disk) to do BIOS upgrades and whatnot. You can use your Portable Linux drive to do that.
  1. Either get a Windows 98 boot floppy image (scroll down to Non-Windows Based Image Files W/ImageApp, get one of them and extract the IMG file inside the zip) --
    or create a Windows 98 boot floppy and extract the image using dd.
  2. Download the latest SYSLINUX from here.  Then extract the file named memdisk inside the directory memdisk to a temporary directory on your computer.
  3. Plug your USB drive in.  Mount the Windows partition on your USB drive.
  4. Open the folder boot inside it.
  5. Put the memdisk file inside it.  Put the image in the same folder, name it win98dos.img.
  6. Now open the grub folder inside the boot folder, and open the file grub.conf with a text editor.
  7. Add the following to the end:
    title           Windows 98 MS-DOS
root            (hd0,0)
kernel          /boot/memdisk
initrd          /boot/win98dos.img
  8. Use a copy of grub.conf to replace the menu.lst file in the grub folder.

Enjoy.  Next time you boot, there will be a menu entry to access MS-DOS.  The drive A: will contain some executables, the drive D: will contain more diagnostic executables (or your first FAT32 partition on your first hard disk), and the drive C: will be the Windows partition of your USB drive, which means you can put the BIOS utilities and images directly there before rebooting, and they'll run fine.

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