Physical disk access under Delphi

[inflater]

Greetings,
I am searching for a Delphi freeware component that can write and read the floppy (*not* harddisks) physically under WinXP. Can you please tell me if it exists and the name? All components that I've found are using logical disk access (FAT) with clusters.

Thank you.
inflater

[~]

Wow! After almost one week later I haven't been able to find a proper match, but maybe if you look for a generic I/O library you could build up a codebase to access your floppy. Try searching for the following in Google:

delphi ports floppy access
delphi i/o library
delphi io library source code
delphi low level access source code

[inflater]

Google Groups: "Try searching TVicFlop."

But neither Google nor Altavista (or Yahoo etc.) have found this Delphi unit.

So I have some choices left:
- Use PARTCOPY bundled with my installation program somewhere (but this will be only possible with installation on floppy disks...), but it is faster than:
- Download RawWriteWin source code in Delphi and make a Windows program that will copy the contents of image file to floppy. 60% slower than using PARTCOPY.
- Download RAWRITE.EXE, MAKEDISK.EXE and make a .BAT file that will execute this program with supplied "image.img" and convert the .BAT to .COM for better look.

I can't just make a self extractor, WinImage won't let me do that because it is not FAT/Linux FS formatted disk.

inflater

[Candy]

If you're going to use an external program, might as well use DD then:

http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/rawwrite/dd.htm

Allows writing arbitrarily and so on. Most common tool on unix to do the same by the way.