OSDev.org

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

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

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.