bartman2589
Member
Just thought I'd share a few links to some really handy utilities for working with Disk Images:
ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver (freeware):http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk ImDisk allows you to mount images for a large number of media types as readable in Windows (NT on up only), assigning a driver letter to each mounted image file so that you can access them from just about any Windows program (even allows you to access the mounted image file from the command prompt, or any DOS based programs that you can get running under the command shell as well). It features integration into the right click context menu to allow for easy mounting/unmounting of image files. Additionally it provides a right click context menu entry to allow you to create an image file from any physical media attached to your computer (it should be noted however that in cases of making image files from hard drives ImDisk is not intelligent enough to manage partition types that are not supported by Windows). Another thing to be wary of is that ImDisk does not actually manage the sizes of the disk images well, in other words if you mount a CD/DVD/Floppy image as writable using ImDisk it is possible to add data to the image file in such a way as to end up with an image file that becomes too large to write to the originally intended media, for this reason I recommend only using ImDisk to mount image files in 'Read Only' mode unless you know for a fact that you have the room to spare on the destination media.
VFD - Virtual Floppy Drive (freeware):http://vfd.sourceforge.net/ VFD is a piece of software that installs itself as a virtual floppy drive in Windows (NT on up only). Much like ImDisk it can allow you to mount disk images, though in this case it is limited to disk images of various types of floppies, however it can mount them in read & write modes (where as if you mount a floppy image in write mode with ImDisk it is possible to add data to it beyond the actual physical disk size the image would be written to, hence making the image unusable for the originally intended media), and also can be used to create various types of disk images without having the corresponding physical media types available physically. It allows you to work with disk images as either files or RAM disks as well. Some of the various disk/drive sizes it emulates are:
RawWrite for Windows (freeware): http://www.chrysocome.net/rawwrite RawWrite for Windows is basically a Windows GUI app that allows you to write 1.44Mb image files (like the ones you can produce using VFD or ImDisk) to physical 1.44Mb floppies, additionally it allows you to make 1.44Mb image files from physical 1.44Mb floppies. The resulting image files are readable by both ImDisk & VFD as well as many other image file manipulation programs such as the program WinImage as well.
WinImage (Shareware, Standard License $30US, Professional License $60US): WinImage is a piece of shareware software designed with the intent to be able to manipulate disk images of various types, with it you can convert disk images from one format/size to another as well as create self-extracting files that can be distributed to others who do not own a copy of Winimage to create physical copies of the disks the images were made from. WinImage is considered to be one of the best utilities for working with disk image files due to it's integrated support for multiple disk image formats in addition to it's own proprietary formats (among which are a couple of compressed formats that can reduce the file size of disk images of various types). WinImage not only supports working with floppy images but other image file types as well, such as CD/DVD ROM disk images (ISO format), as well as images of both virtual (most notably the virtual hard drives used with Virtual PC) and physical hard drives.
Roadkil.Net's DiskImage (freeware): http://www.roadkil.net/program.php/P12/Disk%20Image Roadkil's DiskImage is very similar in functionality to RawWrite for Windows except that it supports making and writing disk images from/to media other than just 1.44Mb floppies. When dealing with hard drives it can make images of just individual partitions or the entire physical drive, same applies to when working with things like USB Flash drives as well.
I hope this information will prove useful to the community.
bartman2589
P.S. - I don't know if any of these utilities will work on versions of Windows above Windows XP as I only have Windows XP installed on my systems (well in addition to Kubuntu 10.10 I mean).
ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver (freeware):http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk ImDisk allows you to mount images for a large number of media types as readable in Windows (NT on up only), assigning a driver letter to each mounted image file so that you can access them from just about any Windows program (even allows you to access the mounted image file from the command prompt, or any DOS based programs that you can get running under the command shell as well). It features integration into the right click context menu to allow for easy mounting/unmounting of image files. Additionally it provides a right click context menu entry to allow you to create an image file from any physical media attached to your computer (it should be noted however that in cases of making image files from hard drives ImDisk is not intelligent enough to manage partition types that are not supported by Windows). Another thing to be wary of is that ImDisk does not actually manage the sizes of the disk images well, in other words if you mount a CD/DVD/Floppy image as writable using ImDisk it is possible to add data to the image file in such a way as to end up with an image file that becomes too large to write to the originally intended media, for this reason I recommend only using ImDisk to mount image files in 'Read Only' mode unless you know for a fact that you have the room to spare on the destination media.
VFD - Virtual Floppy Drive (freeware):http://vfd.sourceforge.net/ VFD is a piece of software that installs itself as a virtual floppy drive in Windows (NT on up only). Much like ImDisk it can allow you to mount disk images, though in this case it is limited to disk images of various types of floppies, however it can mount them in read & write modes (where as if you mount a floppy image in write mode with ImDisk it is possible to add data to it beyond the actual physical disk size the image would be written to, hence making the image unusable for the originally intended media), and also can be used to create various types of disk images without having the corresponding physical media types available physically. It allows you to work with disk images as either files or RAM disks as well. Some of the various disk/drive sizes it emulates are:
3-1/2" Drives:
640Kb
720Kb
820Kb
1.2Mb
1.44Mb
1.68Mb DMF
1.72Mb DMF
2.88Mb
5-1/4" Drives
160Kb
180Kb
320Kb
360Kb
640Kb
720Mb
1.2Mb
Note: some of the types/sizes listed do not actually correspond to existing physical floppy sizes/capacities and are merely provided by VFD for the sake of manipulating data.
It should be noted that since the software emulates a physical floppy disk drive of whatever size is selected (not sure of the actual degree of emulation however) it should in theory be possible to use this software to mount a disk image and then use a disk copy utility to copy the disk to a physical drive, I do not know just how feasible this is as I have not had the need to do something like this myself yet.640Kb
720Kb
820Kb
1.2Mb
1.44Mb
1.68Mb DMF
1.72Mb DMF
2.88Mb
5-1/4" Drives
160Kb
180Kb
320Kb
360Kb
640Kb
720Mb
1.2Mb
Note: some of the types/sizes listed do not actually correspond to existing physical floppy sizes/capacities and are merely provided by VFD for the sake of manipulating data.
RawWrite for Windows (freeware): http://www.chrysocome.net/rawwrite RawWrite for Windows is basically a Windows GUI app that allows you to write 1.44Mb image files (like the ones you can produce using VFD or ImDisk) to physical 1.44Mb floppies, additionally it allows you to make 1.44Mb image files from physical 1.44Mb floppies. The resulting image files are readable by both ImDisk & VFD as well as many other image file manipulation programs such as the program WinImage as well.
WinImage (Shareware, Standard License $30US, Professional License $60US): WinImage is a piece of shareware software designed with the intent to be able to manipulate disk images of various types, with it you can convert disk images from one format/size to another as well as create self-extracting files that can be distributed to others who do not own a copy of Winimage to create physical copies of the disks the images were made from. WinImage is considered to be one of the best utilities for working with disk image files due to it's integrated support for multiple disk image formats in addition to it's own proprietary formats (among which are a couple of compressed formats that can reduce the file size of disk images of various types). WinImage not only supports working with floppy images but other image file types as well, such as CD/DVD ROM disk images (ISO format), as well as images of both virtual (most notably the virtual hard drives used with Virtual PC) and physical hard drives.
Roadkil.Net's DiskImage (freeware): http://www.roadkil.net/program.php/P12/Disk%20Image Roadkil's DiskImage is very similar in functionality to RawWrite for Windows except that it supports making and writing disk images from/to media other than just 1.44Mb floppies. When dealing with hard drives it can make images of just individual partitions or the entire physical drive, same applies to when working with things like USB Flash drives as well.
I hope this information will prove useful to the community.
bartman2589
P.S. - I don't know if any of these utilities will work on versions of Windows above Windows XP as I only have Windows XP installed on my systems (well in addition to Kubuntu 10.10 I mean).
Last edited: