Creating floppy images

[I_NEED_HELP]

Hi i want to install do and windows 3.1 in a virtual machine to play an old game of mine. I no longer own the disks for them however i was able to download them. I created a virtual machine and then realised i have no floppy drive, the last time i used one was probably about three years ago. The only floppy drive i have lying around the house doesnt want to read any of my floppies

 

The first DOS disk was already packaged as an image file which vmware quite happily read the rest of the disks however are just folders with all the required files on that disk. I need to know how i can create a floppy disk image preferably .flp however vmware also seems to accept .IMA files.

 

I found dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/path/to/newfile.flp to create an image from a floppy but i want to create it from a directory.

 

Any help.

[pmpatrick]

If I understand correctly, you have the files in separate folders that go on each floppy in the original install medium but they are not in image format and you need to put them in image format to do the install on your virtual machine.

I think that can be done using "dd" and "loop". First you use dd to create an empty 1.44MB(assuming that's what the original floppies were) image called "floppy.img" here:

 

# dd if=/dev/zero of=floppy.img bs=1k count=1440

 

Next, you format the image you just made:

 

# mkfs -t msdos floppy.img

 

Create a directory to mount the image file called "test":

 

# mkdir test

 

and mount floppy.img on the test directory using loop:

 

# mount -t msdos -o loop floppy.img test

 

Now your just about done. You just need to copy the files for the floppy over to the test directory where floppy.img is mounted. You will need to be root to do so, however. If your running kde, just open up another console and run:

 

$ kdesu konqueror

 

enter the root root password when prompted and konqueror will open with root priviliges. Copy the files to "test" that you need, close konqueror and unmount floppy.img in the remaining console:

 

# umount test

 

Rinse and repeat for your other floppies.

 

Edit: You can name the floppy image file floppy.flp if you want. It doesn't matter to linux what you name it as file extensions are not important in linux like they are in windows. The above technique does create a block device image of a floppy regardless of what you call it; that's what dd does. These types of image files usually are given a "*.img" file name by convention in linux but it really doesn't matter.

Edited May 27, 2005 by pmpatrick