but where can i find a good (and free) floppy disk image (img, ima, or
imz) maker to use with a VM such as Bochs, vmware player, msvpc 2004,
etc. ? need one that'll let me edit the boot sector of the image floppy
? :-L

i tried searching my past posts in A.O.D. but nothing (that is, if i had
asked it already).

On Mar 16, 4:32?pm, Bjarni Juliusson <bja...@update.uu.se> wrote:
Yes, I want to create my own bootable floppy image to use in Bochs (or
other VM) to test my boot code out for my OS (i no longer have access
to a floppy to do real world testing)

proteanthread wrote:
So, does dd do what you want? Do you want to just create a floppy-sized
file and then insert the boot sector into the beginning of the file? If
so, dd can do that with something like

dd if=/dev/zero of=floppy.image bs=512 count=2880
dd if=boot.sector of=floppy.image bs=512 count=1 conv=notrunc

The first line copies 2880 sectors of 512 bytes of zeros from /dev/zero
to a new file, floppy.image. The second line inserts the 512 byte file
boot.sector into the beginning of floppy.image.

If you want to insert other files elsewhere in the image, you can use
the 'seek' option to seek to the right place in the image file.

If you put a filesystem in the image, you can also mount that filesystem
on the host to access the files conveniently. In Linux, this can be done
with the '-o loop' option to mount. In NetBSD, there is a tool called
vnconfig.

Does this answer your question?


Bjarni
--

INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE

"proteanthread" <rtdos@rtdos.com> wrote in message
news:1174093723.297955.254750@y80g2000hsf.googlegr oups.com...
Without a floppy, you could look into QEMU. QEMU has QEMU-IMG.EXE for
creating blank filesystem images without a floppy. I'm not sure how you get
files onto the images. It can create FAT12/16/32 (i.e., vvfat) as well as a
many other formats.

Qemu 0.8.2 binaries for many platforms here:
http://www.h7.dion.ne.jp/~qemu-win/

QEMU Wikipedia listing supported formats (near bottom):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qemu


These four are floppy based solutions, if anyone else needs them. Perhaps
they should be added to a.o.d FAQ(?)...

1) If DOS or Windows dos-prompt, you can use rawread/rawrite or John Fine's
partcopy:

Hans Lerman's rawread.exe and rawread.c (the source is hard to find, Suse
mirrors don't carry it with loadlin...):
ftp://elserv.ffm.fgan.de/pub/linux/loadlin-1.6

Mark Becker's (and/or Guy Helmer's) rawrite.exe.
I have three different versions on my PC: 13k,14k,17k. The 14k one is the
one I use. I'm not sure what the difference is, but it is available from
here:
http://extranet.edfac.unimelb.edu.au...ux/rawrite.exe

These links have the 13k, 17k rawrite.exe versions, documentation, and C
sources for v1.2 and v2.0, but not v1.3 which added command line arguments:
http://www.tux.org/pub/dos/rawrite/
http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/install/mcc/dos-utils/

2) John Fine's partcopy:
http://my.execpc.com/CE/AC/geezer/johnfine/pcopy02.zip

3) If DOS or Win98/SE, you might look at the DOS SHSUFDRV or SHSUCDX
packages:
http://www.geocities.com/jadoxa/shsufdrv/index.html
http://www.geocities.com/jadoxa/shsucdx/index.html

4) If Linux, you can use the 'dd' command (as someone else noted) to create
an image from what's on the floppy.


Rod Pemberton

"Bjarni Juliusson" <bjarni@update.uu.se> wrote in message
news:etk051$fqc$1@Tempo.Update.UU.SE...

P.S. "dd for Windows" can be found at http://www.chrysocome.net/dd


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Bjarni Juliusson wrote:

It does, thanks everyone.