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Mac Forum / Applications / Virtual PC / May 2006Floppy Disk Images
I have a bunch of old floppy disks from years ago that I would like to backup for use with VPC. I have a USB floppy drive what I would like to do is use Disk Utility to create .dmg files. This I can do. But VPC does not seem to allow opening them using the 'Capture Floppy Image' option. The help says I should use the 'Virtual Disk Assistant' to create a .vfd file, mount/capture the image and copy the contents of my disk to it. Apart from being a very tedious process, this misses the point entirely, since what I want is a sector by sector copy of the original disks, which I presume is what Disk Utility does (correct me if I'm wrong). Some of these disks a bootable and I want to use them to boot a virtual machine. I have tried renaming a .dmg file to a .vfd file but VPC is not so easily fooled and refuses to even try to open the file as a floppy image (i.e. I can't even select it in the file dialog). Is there a way to make a disk image of a floppy disk that is both compatible with OSX (i.e. Mountable in Finder) and can also be used as a Floppy Image by VPC? Otherwise, as a last resort, perhapse there is some other utility that runs under windows or OSX that will let me at least create these .vfd files which I've not heard of till using VPC. Thanks Seems that uncompressed disk images (.dmg) files work okay. There is a program called WinImage for windows which is supposed to create compatable disk images but I could not mount the image I created with it. Anyway, problem solved. Seems I can use Disk Utility after all. On 30/5/06 10:58 AM, in article C0A1D5C9.4386%cascadehush@internode.on.net, > I have a bunch of old floppy disks from years ago that I would like to > backup for use with VPC. [quoted text clipped - 25 lines] > > Thanks I would be VERY interested in finding out how you got a disk image on a floppy drive, and uncompressed at that.......since floppy disks have a capacity of 1.44 MB (they are 'old' diskettes) and a virtual disk image would be much much larger than that. Seems I have miscommunicated. The point is to transfer all my old floppy disks into disk images, which I will store either on my HD or on some optical media. The disk images can then be mounted in VPC as if they were a physical disk in the drive, much the same way you can mount an ISO file such that VPC treats it just like a physical CD. My first try was to create a compressed image file (.dmg) which I presumed would work because I thought VPC would use the standard disk image APIs and therefore the format wouldn't matter. But it seems VPC uses it's own code to access the disk images, and so therefore is quite fussy about what images it will read. The end of the story is that if you use Disk Utility in OSX to create a non-compressed, read/write .dmg file of the floppy, then VPC can mount that and the virtual PC can read the 'virtual disk'. And since it's a standard OSX file the image can be mounted in finder and I can get to the files directly. Problem solved. FWIW, the dmg files don't seem to be much larger, if at all, than a physical disk, although I'm sure if you account for the FAT table, etc then the file probably won't fit. OSX reports the file as 1.4M. Perhapse, even though it is not compressed, there is some trickery going on wrt blank sectors not being stored in the image file. Ghost does this, even when you don't compress the image, it still does not store blank sectors unless you force it to. On 30/5/06 12:50 PM, in article 1148957403.300263.131330@g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com, "Paul Power" <paulkpower@gmail.com> wrote: > I would be VERY interested in finding out how you got a disk image on a > floppy drive, and uncompressed at that.......since floppy disks have a > capacity of 1.44 MB (they are 'old' diskettes) and a virtual disk image > would be much much larger than that. >Seems I have miscommunicated. > [quoted text clipped - 9 lines] >to access the disk images, and so therefore is quite fussy about what images >it will read. No, VPC does not use its own image type. Any uncompressed disk image should work. Any type of compressed floppy image will not work.  SignatureCheers, Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP http://vpc.essjae.com/ I do not work for Microsoft. |
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