I am about to release the first version of an utility to build disk image files. I know that there are already many existant ones, but my approach is going to be different from what actually exists.
As a contrary to other utilities, it is going to use a file containing all the information about the disk image to write. Actually, that is the sector size, sector count, as well as a list of sectors whose contents always stay the same (such as the first sector, containing the bootsector), and other information.
The utility builds a disk image in 3 steps :
- Read the configuration file. Since it ressembles a disk map, I decided just to call it a Disk Map File (DMF for short). From the information in that file, it builds a map of the disk, listing the specified sectors.
- Then, it is possible to execute one or more agents that will change the disk map, taking parameters from extra information present in the DMF. This is useful if you want to put a filesystem on the disk image without need to call an external tool.
- Finally, it writes the sectors into the image file, possibly with some transformation, allowing it to support fimage file formats other than raw flat images, or simply compress the output.
I plan on releasing it in approximately 1 week. For the first version, there will only be support for writing a FAT(12/16/32) filesystem onto an image file, either by specifying each file and directory to create, or by simply replicating a directory already present in the host's file system. For the output, there won't initially be transformations available.
I will release it on sourceforge, under the name 'imagebuilder', in all simplicity.
If anyone is interested, please let me know ( abstractsky (at) ymail (dot) com )
