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Virtual floppy writer for Windows?

Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 8:56 am
by Ziddia
Hi,

I currently develop my hobby OS in Windows, with a portion of development done in Ubuntu under a virtual machine. I can't install or dual-boot Ubuntu, or any Linux distro, on this PC, as it's not my personal computer.

I've been using the ISO9660 file system for my bootloader and kernel thus far, as the only properly working image writer I've found for Windows is MagicISO. I want to move away from ISO9660 to a FAT filesystem, but MagicISO doesn't support writing bootable floppys or hard disks - it only works with .iso images, and it only writes an ISO9660 filesystem. Is there any program that can write a FAT12 filesystem to a disk image file, or will I have to constantly switch to Ubuntu and use the tools I have there?

Thanks.

Re: Virtual floppy writer for Windows?

Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 10:04 am
by iansjack

Re: Virtual floppy writer for Windows?

Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 1:50 pm
by Nessphoro
If you want to use a virtual harddrive instead, there is a tutorial on the Wiki.
I think that would be the best choice because you get lots of space and FAT32 which is really easy to implement and you don't have to screw around with the weird FAT12 structures

Re: Virtual floppy writer for Windows?

Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 3:15 pm
by Khronos
I have built my own "fat12maker" in C to build floppy FAT12 images with bootstrap and files.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/fat12maker/

Re: Virtual floppy writer for Windows?

Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 4:21 pm
by Ziddia
Nessphoro wrote:If you want to use a virtual harddrive instead, there is a tutorial on the Wiki.
I think that would be the best choice because you get lots of space and FAT32 which is really easy to implement and you don't have to screw around with the weird FAT12 structures
I'll look into FAT32 instead, thanks.

Re: Virtual floppy writer for Windows?

Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2012 2:56 pm
by bubach
try ImDisk, it's awesome
http://wiki.osdev.org/ImDisk