Bootable Floppy from CD?

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Wed May 24 19:56:21 2000

Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_mcmanis.com> wrote:
> In an effort to preserve all my miscellaneous driver floppies I've been
> copying them to CD-rom. I figured I should also do this for my DOS 6.3
> disks but realized that I don't know how to create a bootable DOS 6.3
> system disk from the disk itself. I've considered using dd(1) on unix to
> create just the disk image that I can later use dd to copy back out but
> was wondering if perhaps there was a better way.

What I use on Linux to back up images of 1440K floppies is:
        dd if=/dev/fd0 of=floppy.img bs=18k

And to recreate them from an image:
        dd if=floppy.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=18k

(The 18k isn't strictly necessary, but for efficiency I like to use a
reasonably large block size that happens to evenly divide into the size
of the disk.)

If the format is something other than 1440K, more specific floppy
device names are sometimes required. With suitable arguments, I've
successfully done this with 160K, 180K, and 360K 5.25 inch diskettes and
720K 3.5 inch as well.

I keep disk images of DOS and various useful utility programs in
a super-secret hidden directory on my web server, so that I can get
them if I need them when I'm not at home.

There's a DOS program called "rawrite" that can recreate floppies
from images, if you need to do it when you don't have Linux or xBSD
handy.
Received on Wed May 24 2000 - 19:56:21 BST