[Technical tips] Boot up to FreeDOS from SPI flash

This article explains how to boot up FreeDOS from SPI flash.

What is SPI Flash means?

SPI：The Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) is a synchronous serial communication interface specification used for short-distance communication, primarily in embedded systems. The SPI bus can operate with a single master device and with one or more slave devices. Typical applications include Secure Digital cards and liquid crystal displays.

SPI Flash is a Flash that uses SPI communication. The two main types of flash memory, are NOR flash and NAND flash. NOR-based flash has long erase and write times, but provides full address and data buses, allowing random access to any memory location. This makes it a suitable replacement for older read-only memory (ROM) chips, which are used to store program code that rarely needs to be updated, such as a computer's BIOS or the firmware of set-top boxes.

Before you begin with the installation, make sure your device has FreeDOS installed.

Operation Video

Target Device:

We will be using the VDX2-6554 (4MB SPI Flash, NOR Flash) to be the target device in this section.

Setup the BIOS to boot up from SPI flash to FreeDOS:

• Enter the BIOS menu, once you press

  Delete

  or

  DEL

  to enter the BIOS.
  
• Select Boot ➔ Boot Settings Configuration ➔ Virtual Flash Floppy ➔ OnBoard
  * BIOS version different may have different options, select OnBoard, External or Enable option to enable the function.
  
• Save BIOS settings by press

  F10

  , and it will bootable the FreeDOS on SPI flash successfully.
  

Result:

After the above steps, it will boot up from SPI flash to FreeDOS as floppy disk A: