I did horrible things with a parallel-port ZIP drive. Had to start loadlin with the kernel parameters to load the appropriate module for it to continue booting...

Side note, running with your root filesystem on a ZIP disk is not performant.

And combined with UMSDOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMSDOS), which stored the Linux files as if they were normal files in the MS-DOS FAT partition, you could run Linux as if it was a normal MS-DOS program (except that you had to reboot to get back to DOS).

fuck ya I used to loadlin from win98, first thing I thought when I saw this post. I had some distro that didn't even need a real disk partition too, it just used a directory on the windows partition as it's root fs