How to make a copy of a floppy disk with an EDS. WinImage Disk Image Creator Burn disk images from MacOS

This may sound surprising to some, but floppy disks are still used in many organizations. We have several programs installed in the accounting department, for work with which electronic digital signatures (EDS) are required. These same EDS are located on floppy disks. But, since floppy disks are a rather unreliable medium (they can fail at any time), you have to make their backups.

For this purpose, I am using the program. With it, you can make a copy of a floppy disk (image), and then, if necessary, write a new floppy disk from this image.

You can download. Run the downloaded file Floppy Image.exe - the program window will open. The upper part is for creating a copy of the floppy disk, and the lower part is for writing a new diskette from the saved copy.

So, insert a floppy disk with an EDS key into the computer - click in top of the window button " Browse”(1).
Then select the folder where the floppy image will be saved - write any Name and click “Save”. Then press the button “ Start”(2) in the main program window and wait until the end of the process of writing data from the floppy disk to the file. That's all!

Now, if your key diskette fails unexpectedly, you will need to insert a blank diskette into the floppy drive and run the program again. Then click in bottom of the window programs button " Browse”(3).
Find the file with the diskette image on your computer - select it and click “Open”. Then press the button “ Start"(4). A window will appear warning you about overwriting all data on the medium - click "Yes".
Wait until the end of the procedure for writing data to the floppy disk.
Then close the program. Now the floppy disk can be used as a key disk.

The mood now is good

WinImage floppy imaging program

If you read the article on my site "Virtual floppy drive", then you probably noticed that there is also a talk about the program winimage. This program is designed to create images of floppy disks, or it can be used in conjunction with a virtual disk drive. You can download it for example Installing it is not difficult, everything is as usual: download, install, enjoy. There is also a crack in the kit. So the program interface can be made Russian. It looks like this:

I don't see any point in examining the full operation of the program. The program is designed to create images of media and restore to clean media from these images. This is relevant in the case when a simple copying of information from a floppy disk to a floppy disk, for example, does not bring the desired result. I will show you how to make a floppy image. Well, how to write a floppy disk from an image. The program interface is intuitive, although, as practice shows, not for everyone. There were a couple of calls about the work of the program, but I think that most likely people simply did not want to figure it out themselves. What for? If you can call.

So, to make an image of a floppy disk, or to recover from an image, we need only two menu items. These are "File" and "Disk / Drive". In the picture above, red arrows point to these menu items. Well, let's install a floppy disk (blank) into the floppy drive, if you do not have a floppy disk drive, then you can use the program , and install a floppy disk in this program. When you click on the "Disk / Disk drive" menu item, you can see the following picture:

Before you read a floppy disk, you need to make sure that the program will read the floppy disk, and not, say, the C: drive. That is, the checkbox is set as shown in the figure above, opposite the A: drive, not the C: drive. Are you convinced? Then click "Read disk (floppy)", as shown in the picture above and wait for the floppy to be read in the drive. The floppy disk is read in tracks, so you have to wait here. If the drive is physical, then 3-5 minutes, if it is virtual, then a few seconds. It should be noted that even if a blank floppy disk is inserted into the drive, it will still be read, and as a result you can get an image of a "blank" floppy disk. But we don't need this, so I put the files into the floppy drive, as shown in the figure below, and read the floppy disk (by the way, I used a virtual floppy drive):

Our task is to make an image of a floppy disk, so let's make it by clicking on the menu item "File" -> "Save as ...", see the figure below:

A regular explorer opens, we come up with a name for the image and indicate the location on the disk where this image will be stored. I recommend creating a separate folder and putting all your images there, unless of course you decide to use this program. So, here's what we got:

In general, I prefer to save images in * .ima format, although in principle it does not matter in which format you save it. This does not mean that you have to do what you want and keep it. As a result, we get a floppy disk image file that can be stored on your hard drive:

As you can see from the figure, the size of the file corresponds to the capacity of the diskette, and no matter what information was on the diskette, the image will always be of the same size. As you already understood, in order to recover from the image, you must first open the image file using the "Open ..." menu item (see Fig. No. 4), and then, after inserting a blank floppy disk into the floppy drive, burn it using the "Burn disk (floppy disk) "(see fig. №2). Well, that's basically all. Good luck with this program.

4.3. Creating floppies from disk images

Boot floppies are usually used as a last resort when the installer can no longer be loaded on a machine that cannot boot from CD or otherwise.

Disk images are files that contain complete information from a floppy disk in raw form. Disk images such as boot.img cannot be copied to a floppy disk normally. To do this, you need to use a special program that writes images of files to a floppy disk in non-standard mode. This is a must because the images are raw data on a floppy disk; write requires execution sector-by-sector copying data from a file to a floppy disk.

There are several techniques (platform dependent) for creating floppies from disk images. This section describes how to create floppies from disk images on various platforms.

It doesn't matter which method you create the floppies, you just have to remember to toggle write protection on the floppies after they are created so as not to inadvertently damage them.

4.3.1. Burn disk images from Linux or Unix systems

To write disk images of files to floppy disks, you will probably need superuser rights. Insert a good, blank floppy disk into your floppy drive. Then enter the command

$ dd if = file of = / dev / fd0 bs = 1024 conv = sync; sync

where file is one of the file disk images. / dev / fd0 is the drive device name, it may be different from the one used on your machine. The command may complete before Unix has finished writing to the floppy disk, so watch the floppy lamp and make sure the lamp goes out and the disk stops spinning before removing the floppy disk. On some systems, you need to issue a command to eject the floppy from the drive.

Some systems try to automatically mount a floppy disk after it appears in the drive. You may need to disable this property, otherwise the workstation will not allow you to write to the floppy in raw mode ... Unfortunately, how this is achieved depends on the operating system.

If the recording is on powerpc Linux, then you need to extract it. Program eject does it well; you may need to install it.

4.3.2. Burn disk images from DOS, Windows or OS / 2

If you have access to an i386 or amd64 machine, you can use one of the programs mentioned below to copy images to floppy disks.

In MS-DOS, you can use programs rawrite1 and rawrite2... Make sure you boot into DOS first. Trying to use these programs in a DOS window under Windows or by double-clicking from Windows Explorer is most likely not will work.

Program rwwrtwin works under Windows 95, NT, 98, 2000, ME, XP and probably later. To use it, you need to unpack diskio.dll into the same directory.

These utilities can be found on the official Debian CDs under the / tools directory.

4.3.3. Burn disk images from MacOS

To create floppies from image files there is AppleScript, Make Debian Floppy. It can be downloaded from. Just drop it on your desktop, then drag and drop any floppy image file onto it. You must have Applescript installed and enabled in the extension manager. Disk Copy will ask you to confirm that you want to erase the floppy disk and write a file image to it.

Also, you can immediately use the macOS utility Disk Copy or a free utility suntar... The root.bin file is a sample floppy image. Use one of the following methods to create a floppy disk from an image.

4.3.3.1. Burn disc images using Disk Copy

If you create a floppy disk image from the official Debian GNU / Linux CD, the Type and Creator are already set correctly. Next steps Creator-Changer only needed if you downloaded image files from a Debian mirror.

Get the Creator-Changer and use it to open the root.bin file.

Change Creator to ddsk(Disk Copy) and Type to DDim(binary image of a floppy disk). The register of the input data is important.

Important: In Finder, use Get Info what to see Finder information about the floppy disk image, and in the field File Locked should stand " X " to prevent macOS from removing boot blocks if the image is accidentally mounted.

Receive Disk Copy; if you have a MacOS system and have a CD, then most likely it already exists, otherwise try

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We work with FDI iS-DOS and TASiS floppy images

In this article I will try to show how you can work with FDI images under iS-DOS.

So, all the conditions are met, you can start :)

In addition to the utilities from the basic set of iS-DOS, you will need programs: sv_image.com, img2fdi.com, cutter.com. You can download them.

First, make sure that the floppy disk you need is generally recognized by the system normally (details about possible problems for compatibility). If everything is in order, and the diskette is recognized normally, one more condition needs to be checked - the diskette must be formatted with a size of no more than 3200 blocks. Anything larger than this size belongs to the area located behind the 80th physical track of the drive, and may not be read on all drives. Usually the vast majority of floppy disks are formatted properly.

The total size of a floppy disk can be found by calling the fileshow.com utility for it:

Create an IMG image of a floppy disk using the sv_image.com utility. To do this, open the device where the image will be written, and call the utility via the command line: [path to the utility] sv_image.com / a.

If the diskette from which the image is being taken is not in drive A, then instead of the / A key, we indicate the key with the corresponding drive (/ B, / C, etc.). The output will be an img file.

The program will start working on creating an image, after which we will receive a file up to 3200 blocks long.

& nbsp

The resulting image must be converted to FDI using the img2fdi.com program. But there is one thing - the program requires a certain amount of free memory for its work. And if there are no problems in iS-DOS Chic and TASiS systems, then in iS-DOS Classic, when you start the program, you can sometimes get error 130 ("not enough memory"):

This problem is solvable. To free up memory, you must first reduce the cache size to the lowest possible level for the system - 6 blocks. The cache.com utility is used for this:

If only decreasing the cache is not enough for the normal launch of img2fdi.com (which is very unlikely), you can free up memory by removing unnecessary residents or drivers from it. To do this, the eliminat.com utility is called. For a start, it will display a menu with a list of drivers and residents installed on the system:

Some of this list will have to be sacrificed to free up memory. From the above list, I removed the unnecessary one by this moment driver for Slave-hard drive (lba_s) and print driver 64 characters per line (ty64). What will have to sacrifice in your case - I do not know for sure, see for yourself. Naturally, you should not remove the Master-hard drive driver, the floppy drive driver (sys_driv) or the 42-character-per-line print driver (ty42). The rest can be removed. You should not be afraid that something in the system will break down when the residents are deleted - after a reboot, the system will again be with the old set of drivers and residents. Here's what I got after removing lba_s and ty64:

After that, launch img2fdi.com. The program has its own GUI and does not require any input data to be passed through the command line. We point in the program to the desired IMG image and start converting. The output file is created on the same device as the IMG file:

& nbsp

After running the img2fdi.com program, we get the FDI file:

The image must be somehow transferred to the IBM PC (otherwise why did we create it then?). If the original img file was large (about 700K or more), the drive volume is not enough to transfer such a large file in one pass (713K of data is placed on an MS-DOS 720K floppy disk, and an FDI file occupies more than 800K). Don't worry, for this I wrote a clever program called cutter.com. It allows you to split any file into pieces of any length. Launch cutter.com, specify which file to split and the size of the parts into which the file will be split. For example, for a 720K MS-DOS floppy disk, the default 640K is sufficient. The program can at the same time calculate the CRC32 file for subsequent control of the splicing of files on the IBM PC. The presence of a turbo mode on the computer will be useful, since the process of breaking down and calculating the CRC32 is rather slow.

Do not forget to set the type of numbering of the output files: if you select "extension", the numbering will be carried out through the file extension. If you select "name", the numbering will be in the last three characters of the file name. If you intend to transfer files to an IBM PC using MS-DOS floppy disks, then it is better to choose the "extension". If the transfer will be on TR-DOS floppy disks, then you should choose "name". The fact is that when files are written to a TR-DOS floppy disk, the file extension is partially lost, and the numbering of files in the extension does not make sense.

& nbsp

After splitting, we get files with extensions in the form of numbers (* .001, * .002, etc.) and one file with * .crc extension (if CRC32 counting mode was enabled):

In the case of numbering through the file name, the list of files will be slightly different, but this is not important.

These files need to be gradually transferred to the IBM PC using MS-DOS floppy disks (for example). In the case of MS-DOS floppies, copy the files onto them using the to_msdos.com utility:

After transferring all files to the IBM PC, you can "glue" them, for example, in Total Commander:

The resulting FDI file can be checked in the emulator, and then used as intended :)

Method number 2 - if you need to take an image from any floppy disk

In fact, you cannot get a working fdi image from any floppy disk. The floppy disk must have (how to put it more precisely) the correct format. Those. there should be no unreadable sectors and any other nonsense that makes copying difficult even for ordinary track-based copiers with auto-recognition of the disk format (Omega Copy, SoftCopy, UFO, etc.). Of course, copy-protected floppy disks, which use information in the intersectional space, disappear (such protection was on the proprietary Spectrofon disks with electronic journals).

To create an FDI image from any floppy disk, I wrote the makefdi.com program:

The program works in the iS-DOS Classic / Chic system. Understands DS DD floppy disks (80 tracks, 2 sides). Works on computers with 48K memory and above. In short, the program is not demanding on a computer. The presence of a hard drive is highly desirable (otherwise where will you save the fdi-file?). The program also allows you to enter a text commentary on the created image and specify the number of tracks that will be scanned.

The program works in two passes - first it scans all the tracks on the floppy disk and makes a table of sectors, and then directly copies the information from the floppy disk to the image.

After obtaining the fdi image, it can be transferred to MS-DOS floppies and then to an IBM PC.

Writing an FDI image to a floppy disk on the ZX-Spectrum

The fdi2disk.com program is used to write the contents of an FDI image to a floppy disk:

The program interface is similar to the makefdi.com program. The system requirements are the same as for makefdi.com.

When the program is called, we indicate to it the path to the fdi-file, after which we select "START" - and let's go!

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Material from the Wiki site

What is a floppy image

A floppy image is a file that contains a complete copy of a floppy disk, including information about the file system, files and directories, and the boot sector. Common formats are files with the extensions ima, img, imz (imz is a compressed floppy image)

What are floppy images for?

It would seem that floppy drives are outdated; today, floppy drives are practically not installed in new computers. They put in servers (their own specifics), and even if necessary for compatibility with some dense software and the same dense organizations of tax and other accounting. But...
A floppy drive is the easiest and fastest way to flash the BIOS, run a PC test program (most test programs are distributed as floppy images), and even download to the machine operating system from a remote computer. Accordingly, for all these operations, you can download (prepare yourself) a floppy image and burn a floppy disk to fit your needs. Many old games have survived as floppy images. In addition to the real floppy drive, almost all virtual machines support booting from floppy images. But the most interesting thing in my opinion is to make a 100v1 multiboot USB flash drive from floppy images :)