Obtain Floppy Image Files
Preamble:- Floppy images are archive files that represent a physical floppy disk. They include inside them not only a file-archive but also all the other metadata, such as the boot sector and the FAT tables. They come in all shapes and sizes to match a variety of physical floppies and can be normal or compressed or self-extracting. Only use fully decompressed image files if using such 'images' to make your own bootable CDs.
Download a floppy image
Go to bootdisk.com's bootdisk page and scroll down to the section headed "Non-Windows Based Image Files W/ImageApp". Download and unzip one of the entries. The Win98sc.zip file in the Win98SE link (or its mirror) is a good gold standard that we recommend. Inside the zip file will be a 1440kB file with .img as its file extension and which is the floppy disk image. One especially good thing about such bootdisk.com images is that they nearly all come with intrinsic CDROM support.
Make your own from a functional floppy diskette
Graphical User Interface (GUI) Programs
- There are a number of very good freeware applications that can convert floppies to images and vice versa; for example the very straightforward 3.5Master (562kB Free) or EMT4WIN.
- The shareware WinImage is very widely used and has many additional functions. With a floppy in its drive, you would open WinImage and from its 'Read' menu choose Read Disk. If it doesn't immediately read the diskette try a second time. As long as the floppy is readable and the reading completes without errors you just need to choose Save As from the 'File' menu. Choose the .ima file extension if you want a raw image to use in a bootable CD and only choose the .imz one for compressed files if you wish to archive your own floppy diskettes as image files and use the minimum amount of space.
- Owners of recent versions of PowerQuest's Drive Image (not sure about Symantec's Ghost since the take-over) should find they have a bundled program called 'VF Editor' that is a very useful, if a bit watered down, version of WinImage fully capable of doing such imaging tasks.
Command Line Programs.
- Linux users can use the 'dd' program of which there is now also a Windows version dd for Windows 1.03 (193kB Free). It is a command line utility and to see its various options just enter dd in the folder it was extracted to. For example:-
C:\ddForWin\> dd
- To see a list of any attached drives, as enumerated by Windows, then enter:-
C:\ddForWin\> dd --list
- To create a floppy.img file of a 1.44MB floppy in its A: drive into the directory holding dd.exe one might enter the line:-
C:\ddForWin\> dd bs=512 count=2880 if=\\?\Device\Floppy0 of=floppy.img
Extract an existing image from a bootable CD
All bootable CDs contain a boot image file. These files can make the CD emulate a floppy or a hard drive or (for example with Windows installation CDs) not use any emulation at all. A CD's boot image file can be extracted using the wonderful freeware application IsoBuster. Open the program with the CD in its drive. If the CD is bootable then one of the icons in the left pane will be that of a floppy diskette; (note that using IsoBuster like this is a way to tell whether or not a given CD should be bootable or not). Highlight the floppy icon in the left pane and in the right pane you should now see a .cat and a .img file. Simply drag the .img file from the right pane onto your desktop. As long as the CD was using floppy emulation then this .img file will be that of a floppy disk image. There are also two similar but different applications called MagicISO and UltraISO that both can extract bootable images from bootable CDs.
Build your own images from scratch
Since there is a lot of good free software with which one can make floppy images there would seem to be little need to create brand new images from scratch. It can however be done. Bart Lagerweij no longer actively supports his early webpages on the Nu2 website but the means and methods outlined there still enable one to do this. Amongst these pages are the BFI - Build Floppy Image and BFD - Build Floppy Disk ones. BFI is basically a free command line version of WinImage without the full range that WinImage has. With it one can construct one's own floppy images from the component parts. If bootable floppy images are needed then a read of the "BFD" page is worthwhile. You will need, as a minimum, the following group of files (and all must be for the same version of DOS or other operating system); a copy of the 512-byte boot sector and (for MS-DOS) io.sys, msdos.sys and command.com or (for Novell-DOS ibmbio.com, ibmdos.com and command.com. This is akin to putting a blank formatted floppy into its drive using, say Win98, and from a DOS prompt entering sys a: in order to transfer the system files to the floppy or under WinXP by choosing to format and ensuring the checkbox to "Create an MSDOS startup disk" is checked.
Modifying the existing contents of a floppy image
You could use WinImage or MagicIso for this. Just open the image file with the applications and then inject, extract and delete files to customise the contents the way you want them. Make sure you start off with a known bootable image as the template rather than start off by creating a brand new file with these applications if you want to produce a bootable image file. They create a usable but non-bootable boot sector when simply choosing to make a brand new image.
