Creating Floppy Disk Images in Linux to Backup Disks …but all of the information you need to read and write floppy images is below. The full user manual for the dd command can be found by running: man dd The dd command will be used to read and write floppy images. So within no time at all, you’ll have your vintage PC back in action, like mine below. Linux has the required tools built right in, and cheap, compatible USB floppy disk drives are ubiquitous. Modern Windows PCs lack floppy drives and lack the tools for creating boot disks. This used to be pretty simple – when Windows computers came with floppy disk drives and included the required tools, it was pretty easy to get some MS-DOS software onto a disk ready for use on an older machine. Part of this usually involves re-installing the operating system and loading up software. I dabble a bit in vintage computing – finding old computers, fixing them up, and getting them back into action – usually for playing games on era-appropriate hardware. This is information that I copied directly from an existing blank floppy image into a raw binary data file, which is to be read from and then copied onto the first 512 bytes of the new floppy image by dosformat.This article will show you how to read and write images to floppy disks in Linux – Perfect for vintage computing (MS-DOS, Macintosh, etc.) The second part – dosformat – formats this file as a floppy disk image by writing all the FAT filesystem metadata to it. The floppy generator I have written actually consists of two parts: The first part – mkfloppy – creates a blank file where all bytes are zero.

So I wrote my own version of mkfs.msdos that I call mkfloppy. Of course you can always use Linux’s mkfs.msdos command to do this, but I wanted a cross-platform solution that would work on any POSIX system (keep in mind I was using MacOS at the time).

I’m going to show you a program that I wrote a while back that uses POSIX API functions to create a blank formatted floppy disk image for VirtualBox VMs running MS-DOS How do you do, fellow old-timers? Today’s post is going to be a bit of a crossover, because I’m going to get into some programming stuff, some Linux stuff, and some DOS stuff all at the same time.

Linux format floppy disk for ms dos