I had a need for writing an image file for FreeDOS to a floppy drive. I didn’t see any tools nor had I heard of any tools so I went to searching the great repository called the world wide web.
Bottom Line up front: It’s pretty simple to write a disk image to a USB floppy drive. The
Where it Started
Mostly out of curiosity, I wanted to see if I could boot from a floppy onto an old laptop to update the bios. I have one USB 3.5″ Floppy drive that is usable and a hand full of good floppy disks. It was from here I downloaded Floppy Edition here:
https://www.freedos.org/download
When all 20.7 MB of zipped up data is downloaded, unzipped there are three sets of images:
720k - 3.5" 720k diskette images144m - 3.5" 1.44mb diskette images120m - 5.25" 1.2mb diskette images
I have 3.5″ 1.44 MB floppy disks so that was what I went with.
The obvious choice between these six files is the x86BOOT.img. Upon careful observation, the floppy drive is not fd0 but rather sda, because this is a USB floppy drive.
That makes a difference when it comes time to do the BURNING! Or rather, imaging of the disk. Since the floppy is mounted from from /dev/sda, this is what I did to make this FreeDOS floppy. While in the directory with the disk image:
sudo dd if=x86BOOT.img of=/dev/sdaThe writing took very little time and very excitingly it works. I was very happy to be able to see it wasn’t any more complicated then that!
Final Thoughts
That’s all there really is to it. Super simple but it really would be cool if there was a good GUI that did such a thing that integrated nicely into the KDE Plasma desktop environment but I’m quite certain that it is such a tiny percentage of people that would ever use this so I don’t expect anything of the sort to happen here.
Something that is weird, tho, why would imaging a floppy require root permissions. I understand why this is the case but I think it is a level of security just a bit too far. Well, maybe it’s not. Okay, I am totally undecided on what the security posture should be on this.
Linux truly makes computers fun!
Leave a Reply to A USB floppy drive for retro computing – The Silicon UndergroundCancel reply