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Write Disk Images to USB Floppy Drive

Smack2k

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Jan 8, 2013
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Pittsburgh, PA
Is there any software that will allow disk images (.img / etc..) to be written to USB Attached Floppy Drives?

Trying to get some Disk Images I have onto Floppy Disks and the only way I have to get the .img to the floppy is by USB Attached Floppy...
 
Be aware that you're pretty much limited to PC and modern Mac formats (i.e. 512 byte MFM sectors) under USB floppy.

For the old CP/M machines you need legacy interface drives.
 
WinImage it is.....will give it a shot....appreciate it!

EDIT - Is there a trick to this? I have attached 3 different USB FLoppy Drives to my Windows 7 laptop and attempted to write a disk image to them from WinIMage

Open the image, choose write to disk...it errors out on track 1 and from there my floppy is unusable unless I reboot...same thing happens again...these are 3 USB Floppy Drives that all worked fine before I tried them with WinImage...
 
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What kind of disk images are you trying to write?

Note USB floppy drives only support 1.44mb and 720k disk images. And many don't actually support 720k like they should. Those drives need to be smashed with a hammer and left to rot on a pile of pulverized PCI winmodems.

Most notably, DMF (1.7MB) disk images won't work.
 
Just a simple .img file of DOS 6.22 to a 1.44MB Floppy....

Once I have tried them in WinImage the disks dont work anymore at all, I cant format them or anything....not sure why...dont want to try to many more disks...
 
Where did you get that .IMG file?

Have you ever successfully restored that particular file to a disk before?

Try formatting the disk(s) in a DOS computer before (and after unsuccessfully) using WinImage on them.

Alternatively you could try using a DOS program to restore the .IMG.
 
IMG file from here - https://www.kirsle.net/msdos

I have formatted them in Windows with no issues before they try to write the image...but afterward they are unable to format or read or anything.. As for a straight DOS format, I have nothing at the present time hooked up with DOS running on it as my 286 crashed last night (great timing I know) when I was trying to see if I had the DOS images on it already to write to disk....

Do you know if DOSBOX would write an image to a USB Floppy? I know I could map to it via DOSBOX, but would it write? If so, I could give that a shot, but like I said, the two disks I have tried already using WinImage in Windows 7 just wont read any longer...no idea why.
 
None of the lobotomized "modern" BIOSes I have seen support low-level formatting USB floppies. They just ignore the low-level format int13 command, so it may look like it worked if the disk was already formatted. Tools like ImageDisk won't work with USB drives since there is no real floppy disk controller chip.

Also, most emulators don't talk directly to floppy drives. And if there is something wrong with the system, then you might still run in to the same problem.

But a few random ideas:
Winimage supports writing without re-formatting, and writing with formatting. See if one or the other makes a difference.
Perhaps try a newer or older version of Winimage.
Perhaps try running Winimage as administrator.
Perhaps try disabling virus scanners - some will incorrectly detect the old MS-DOS AV programs as viruses.
Make sure the disks format error-free on another computer.
Check that the Windows command-line formatter will format the disks unconditionally.
 
Linux usually has enough support to handle formatting floppies on a USB drive (cf. udisks), but if you're not familiar with Linux, it's going to be an uphill battle.
 
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The formatter inside Windows XP/Vista/7/and so on will also perform USB low-level formats, but usually READS from the disk first, so it can often get very confused and die if the disk is not either completely blank, or already properly formatted.
 

On my Windows 7 (64-bit) box:

1. Attached a 1.44M USB diskette drive. Noted that it then appeared in Windows 7 as drive B: (already have an A:).
2. Ran WinImage 9.00
3. WinImage: Opened the first image file, Dos622-1.img

WinImage showed the contents of the image file.

4. WinImage: On menu bar, chose [Disk] then chose [Use floppy B:]
5. Inserted an already used 1.44M diskette into drive B:
6. WinImage: On menu bar, chose [Disk] then chose [Write Disk]
7. WinImage: In response to the 'disk is not empty. Continue?' type question, answered affirmative.

WinImage wrote the image. During that time, a 'Writing verifying' window was displayed, and that included a progress bar.

I then used the diskette to boot one of my computers into DOS 6.22 [pressed F3 after the SETUP screen appeared].

----------------------------------------------

I then retried the operation using a blank diskette. The only differences were:
* the 'disk is not empty. Continue?' type question was not presented, and
* a formatting' pass on the diskette was done before the 'Writing verifying' pass.

----------------------------------------------

In case it is relevant, the motherboard (980DE3/U3S3 R2.0) supports 1.44M drives (my A: is an internal 1.44M drive)
 
That's pretty much irrelevant to the BIOS, as Win7 doesn't use the BIOS for anything, other than the initial system load. After that, it's all protected-mode drivers.
 
I have had some success running code under DosBox as I have mostly 64-bit Windows/10 and many disk tools don't play well with those. I also now have a box of USB floppy drives which seem to behave differently. I guess I need to get the lids off them and table the chip sets and drive mechs in them...
 
WinImage it is.....will give it a shot....appreciate it!

EDIT - Is there a trick to this? I have attached 3 different USB FLoppy Drives to my Windows 7 laptop and attempted to write a disk image to them from WinIMage

Open the image, choose write to disk...it errors out on track 1 and from there my floppy is unusable unless I reboot...same thing happens again...these are 3 USB Floppy Drives that all worked fine before I tried them with WinImage...

Run winimage in Administrator mode.

;)
 
Run winimage in Administrator mode.

;)

Yeah, this would be key, the software has to make some major changes to the floppy, and if it's not elevated then Windows will block it from making the changes, which could very well explain your "Sector 0 bad" error messages.
 
Running WinImage in Admin mode did the trick....and running it on another computer....not sure why my laptop install of Win 7 Pro is such a piece....
 
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