Bootable Floppy from CD?

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Thu May 25 10:02:46 2000

At 05:45 PM 5/24/00 -0700, Chuck McManis 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.

People seem to have confused your request. I did not think you
wanted a bootable CD. :-)

The 'dd' approach has a few failings. One, it's not tolerant of
bad sectors, right? Two, I think you'd need to be sure that your
box's settings could handle all the old variations of disk capacity
from the old days. Three, raw disk images aren't easily searchable
and indexable in the same way as 'tar' or 'zip', but of course those
formats wouldn't handle the boot sectors. After all, you'd want to
find things after you archived them.

I talk about a few of these issues on my page at
http://www.threedee.com/jcm/diskutil/.

- John
Received on Thu May 25 2000 - 10:02:46 BST

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