Additional Floppy Formats?

D

drtimhill

Member
This is a minor feature request, but as it's been bugging me so I thought I would request it...

Feature Request:
-- Add additional file types allowed (other than *.fdd) for floppy disk images

Details:
At present, PW supports floppy disk image files with a type of .fdd only (for example, when browsing for a floppy disk image to attach to a VM). It would increase PW compatibility significantly if it also supported additional file type commonly found on the PC platform.

For example, VMware works with the .vfd floppy disk format commonly used by WinImage and other floppy disk imaging tools. Users (such as myself) who have a library of .vfd files would be able to use these files directly within PW without any inconvenience.

Additional Details:
Please note that this is NOT a request for PW to support a new floppy disk file format: Both .fdd and .vfd files are actually identical internally (you can rename a .vfd file to .fdd and have it work in PW). It's just a request to support opening of .vfd files via the Mac standard open dialog when browsing for a floppy disk image in PW. Should be *really* easy to add!!! :)

Thanks,
Tim
 
I'd also like to see support for mounting DiskCopy images, both 6 and 4.2 formats, since those are formats we're used to using on the Mac and can easily be mounted on both OS X and then on Windows or whatever if the VM supported it.
 
I think that all you have to do is drop down the File Type at the bottom of the Choose FDD Image file dialog, select 'All Files', and then you can use any extension you like for a floppy image. There is no limitation via file extension for using floppy images. I don't see where using Mac formats is useful since you are booting images from only non-Mac OSs - at least until OSX becomes guest VM capable.
 
I'm not talking about booting from floppy images, but about copying files off of them by mounting them in Windows or whatever other OS you happen to be running.
 
tgrogan said:
I think that all you have to do is drop down the File Type at the bottom of the Choose FDD Image file dialog, select 'All Files', and then you can use any extension you like for a floppy image. There is no limitation via file extension for using floppy images. I don't see where using Mac formats is useful since you are booting images from only non-Mac OSs - at least until OSX becomes guest VM capable.
Click to expand...

That's true for Windows, but not for Mac hosts, which don't allow you to select anything but a file with a type of .fdd. Did you try it?

--Tim
 
It would also be useful to be able to use raw floppy images, as created by dd under Linux for example (I assume VFD is a different format to this).
 
ncafferkey said:
It would also be useful to be able to use raw floppy images, as created by dd under Linux for example (I assume VFD is a different format to this).
Click to expand...

I'm not familiar with the Linux format, but the VFD format is about as raw as you can get; no header, just 1.44MB of sectors, directly mapped to the file.

--Tim
 
If that's all it is, then you should be able to create a floppy image file with dd. I'll try that as soon as my download of Beta6 with the hotfix finishes.
 
Yep. To get an image file on a Linux box, stick the floppy in the drive, then issue the command

dd if=/dev/fd0 of=(filename).vfd bs=18k

as root (or, if it's set up, you can use sudo). The expected response is

80+0 blocks in
80+0 blocks out

followed by a shell prompt. That means all 80 tracks were read.

You have to do it as root because the floppy drive is owned by root and set to not allow any other user to read it. Changing that is left as an exercise for the reader.
 
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