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If you try the steps below, please do it on your own risks. I won't take responsibilities for consequences.
If you acquired a vintage FM TOWNS unit, the internal CD drive may already be dead. In that situation, you may be left with booting from a floppy disk. Even if you have a hard disk emulator like SCSI2SD and a disk image, FM TOWNS won't boot from SCSI2SD until you assign a drive letter.
To assign a drive letter to a partition, you need to boot. If CD drive is dead, only way to boot is from a floppy disk.
If you have a bootable disk image, you can burn it to an actual floppy disk in Windows 10. Then how can you create a bootable floppy disk with all utilities to assign drive letters etc.
It can be done using an excellent FM TOWNS emulator "UNZ" and a utility from Freesoftware Collection 5 called LZEXP, developed by elfin. The author granted a permission for re-distribution as long as I bundle the documentation and the source code. So I put it in my package so that you don't have to find it yourself.
The emergency boot disk has disk formatting, hard-disk partitioning, disk copy, and drive-letter assignment utilities. Also it still has about 20KB available space where you can install CDSD.SYS and CDISC2.SYS if necessary.
The following steps can be done in actual FM TOWNS if your FM TOWNS has a live internal CD drive. If you do have such a FM TOWNS in good condition, you should definitely create 10 emergency boot disks and store in multiple different locations so that you can start FM TOWNS even after the armagedon. In that case, extract files from the disk image and copy to a FM TOWNS format floppy disk (who is saying PC-9801 format? Call it FM TOWNS format). And run the script from there.
You need to have:
> A:
> SETUP_EN.BAT
A message to confirm you have a system-copied FD in B drive and Towns OS CD-ROM in Q drive will appear. After pressing a key and waiting for several minutes, it creates a English-localized GUI bootable floppy disk in drive B. I wrote English localizer, but in some messages I could only translate word by word, which means I couldn't change the word order. Also I couldn't extend the message. So, you may see a message like "Sound Message inop occ" (Direct translation was "Sound Message inoperable occurred." But, what I really I wanted to say was "Sound Message is inoperable.") Or, I had to crunch "Config" to "CNFG". I hope better than mysterious Kanji characters.
If you are fine with Japanese GUI, just type "SETUP.BAT" instead.
If you did it in actual FM TOWNS, you are ready to go. Keep a disk in the B drive in a safe place. I suggest to make multiple copies and store multiple locations to prepare for the doomsday.
If you did it in the UNZ emulator, you can burn the image in drive B to an actual floppy disk and use it to start an FM TOWNS unit with a dead CD drive.
If you need to pack something else, you can create 29KB additional space by deleting TOWNS.ICO. Icons will not be visible, but at least you can click and run.
Comments are welcome.
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