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What tools do you guys use to make disk images when testing your OSes in emulators? When not booting via PXE, I use PARTCOPY but that will only allow me to cope with flat disk images. I know there are techiques like emulating floppies and so on but I think the most convenient thing would be to have a proper tool that would allow us to make disk images (not only for floppies) in various formats (flat, iso, vmdk, etc) and let us choose for instance what sectors we want where (e.g. MBR as the first sector for a vmdk image). If such an application could also understand several popular filesystems it would be the perfect tool. Is there such a thing?

EDIT: forgot to mention that I'm a Windows user.

Norton Diskedit comes with Norton Utilities and works nicely for me. Other people here have had trouble running it, though.

The main problem is that various images (floppy vs CD) are inherently used differently (CDs are write-once, floppies read-write) and therefore software dealing with them tend to follow the same approach.

still, on windows you can get away with mtools, mkisofs and dd (but you'll require cygwin and you only get FAT and iso9660 support that way)

Sounds like I need to start working again on vdisk

On Linux I use flat disk images, loopback devices and mount: and copy the kernel image onto it.

Back when I was using Windows, I remember using a rather dubious, but mostly functional, virtual disk driver, to achieve the same effect, but I can't remember what it was called, or where I got it from.

xlq wrote:Back when I was using Windows, I remember using a rather dubious, but mostly functional, virtual disk driver, to achieve the same effect, but I can't remember what it was called, or where I got it from.

It probably was FileDisk, FileDisk64, VirtualDisk (or VirtualDisk for TC) or its clones...

Combuster wrote:The main problem is that various images (floppy vs CD) are inherently used differently (CDs are write-once, floppies read-write) and therefore software dealing with them tend to follow the same approach.

I agree, there should be some kind of 'Virtual CD Drive' that works exactly like Virtual Floppy Drive and lets you write and read freely from the CD. To emulators, it will just look like 'another CD-drive' while for OSDevers it's an invaluable tool as you can freely read and write your kernel as you please and you're not limited to 1.44 MB (or other floppy sizes). Sadly I don't know too much about making things like virtual drives and mounting so I'm useless.

Combuster wrote:Sounds like I need to start working again on vdisk

Please do

Hi,

since my current OS still useing FAT-32 LFN (long file name),

i'm useing [ UltraISO ],because you can creat CD-iso,edit,remove
files & make it bootable easily

if you addopt FATxx fs i suggest you UltraISO

NOTE: UltraISO is Commercial,but you can download trial version

CheerS
a.T.d

I'm not looking for anything that would mount drives. If I want to distribute hard disk images to testers for instance, I'd have to make mount a virtual drive, format it, rewrite the boot sector and create an image for that drive. I'm looking for something that will let me work directly with disk images. If there's no such thing, I will write my own tool and share it with whoever needs it.

Love4Boobies wrote:What tools do you guys use to make disk images when testing your OSes in emulators?

fasm allows to make a disk image with any FS structure if you know this structure perfectly.

There are some tools for Windows (which I use sometimes) like this: bximage, winimage, cdrwin and so on.

http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/vfd.html

Virtual Floppy Drive for Windows: it works like a loopback but makes a windows-style A: or B: drive that uses the image. You can either use the "RAM" option (makes a copy of the image in RAM and mounts that) or "File" option (does all the reads/writes directly to the image file, I think.)