G‎reetings.
Yes,Rufus is good for installing FreeDOS to a flash drive/CF/SD card,etc.,it contains FreeDOS,but some RDDs(flash drives/SDs/CFs) r not made successfully bootable by Rufus because of a proprietary MBR from the flash drive manufacturer,often designed exactly against making the drive bootable,in this cases U must rebuild the terget drive's MBR & may be totally impossible,if the target drive is Superfloppy with proprietary boot sector incompatible for standard bootstrap.
Usually rebuilding MBR fixes the drive to be able to be bootable,i had success with Partition Guru for DOS,not very successful doing so via Windows.
But those "some USB sticks" the problem is definitely a proprietary MBR,which must be rebuilt.
Live long & prosper.
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LIVE LONG & PROSPER,live & let live=DO NOT EAT,NOR WEAR ANIMALS,nor do not pay Their Murderers & oppressors,please.
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From: Thomas Desi via Freedos-user
Sent: Friday, February 13, 2026 10:50.‎
To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Cc: Thomas Desi‎.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] Fix mbr?‎

RUFUS is s good tool to format and boot FreeDOS from USB. 
Some USB Sticks DON’T work. I have no idea why. 
Try also different partitionings (in RUFUS possible)
For me VERBATIM USB sticks always work.
I can boot from one (C:) and have a second also attached, which becomes D:, both work.

I had a bunch fo cheap sticks, FreeDOS doesn’t even recognise. 

good luck
Thomas

Am 12.02.2026 um 20:10 schrieb Jakob Stengård via Freedos-user <[email protected]>:

So i installed freedos on a pre-formated compact flash card.
As it turns out, the computer won't boot from the drive.

Now, i have re-formated the drive and put all the files back.
Can use some command on the boot disk to just write the MBR,
or do i need to run setup.bat and will that work?

I don't want to run all of the installer again, that took 3 hours last time.

Many thanks.
--

Med vänlig hälsning (Best Regards)
Jakob Stengård
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