DOS + Windows 3.11... on a single floppy!

Seriously! Fully functional Windows 3.11 booting on just ONE floppy! Bonkers!

Check out this craziness! Someone managed to squeeze a version of MS-DOS 7.1 and Windows 3.11 onto a single 3.5” floppy.

I repeat: You can boot directly into Windows 3.11… off a single Floppy.

Whoever created it goes by “DOS China Union” (seems to be a group of people)… and did this work back in 2006. I hadn’t seen this until now (and the original Geocities webpage is long gone), luckily a version is also hosted up at Archive.org.

Seriously. It’s absolutely insane. Check this out:

That’s what it looks like when first launching.

It then asks if you want to launch “Mini-Windows”, or just boot into DOS 7.1.

Shazam! There it is! Windows 3.11 booting entirely off a floppy drive!

And it works.

Sure, a lot of the software you’d normally expect isn’t there. But it has just enough to use. Which is pretty gosh darned impressive.

There’s the bootable floppy disk when looking at it in the Windows File Manager. Barebones… but functional. Amazing.

You can grab the floppy .img file from Archive.org and it’ll boot in just about any emulator (or you can write the image to an actual floppy and boot from real hardware).

I’m going to be honest. I don’t have an actual use for this. But it’s such an incredibly cool accomplishment that I just had to share.

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