Rawrite and related (floppy) disk imaging programs.

Information:

This directory contains the various RaWrite (or similar) programs I have found.
Rawrite and similar are "disk imaging" programs. This page is primarily for floppy diskette image manipulation programs, however I will also include other imaging programs (such as for hard drives) as I find them or people let me know of them.
My goal is to maintain a comprehensive listing, or at least a thorough enough one that people can find the right program for their needs. See also Wikilearn's Rawrite section. This does not include all possible versions (as I have seen newer binary releases of rawrite than any of these sources for rawrite.c); when possible sources are also here.

A disk image is a file which contains the full contents of the specified disk in a single file; the contents are generally read as raw sectors so all data including partition information (FAT), boot sector, along with actual directory entries and files are copied to the image. An image file is specific to a particular format, so a 1.44MB image should be written to a 1.44MB floppy diskette and 1.2MB image should be written to a 1.2MB floppy diskette. However, some programs may support cross diskette writing (i.e. 1.2MB disk image to a 1.4MB disk drive) and hard drive images can often (though really depends on what the used program supports) be written to hard drives of the same or larger size [possibly adjusting data to resize partition and take advantage of additional size]. A disk image is different from an archive [zip/arj/etc.] as it contains a snapshot (or image) of the contents and does not differentiate between OS data (FAT/etc.) and user data (particular files/directories/etc.); which are not generally accessible until written back to a disk; and use different means to access the data bypassing the OS's filesystem layer; also a diskimage will generally produce identical disk copies, whereas archives generally are equivalent to copying the files to a new diskette. See http://www.rundegren.com/software/floppyimage/faq/ for additional information about disk images.

This page being reviewed and updated, links to local copies may not work yet. Please feel free to send me (jeremyd@computer.org) additional information about included items, information about not yet included items, or any suggestions or corrections. Be sure to include 'rawrite' some where in your subject line or I will never see your message.

[Note: I make no claim over the usability or compilability of any program listed here. Some I have I tried, none have I compiled.]

Please, if you find any content here that should not be available or you (copyright holder) wish to be removed, send me an email including rawrite in subject [to get pass my email filters] so I may remove it as soon as feasible! Because sites come and go, and I do not have the time nor desire to constantly check links, most archives are also available from here -- please try the home site first, as important updates may be available. Thank you, and as some programs do not have a clear license statement, I apologize in advance to any copyright owners who do not want their material available here.

Basic Usage (Rawrite):

Depending on the exact version, the output and command line support may vary, i.e. not work

 Usage:
	MS-DOS prompt> RAWRITE
		and follow the prompts, -or-

	MS-DOS prompt> RAWRITE [-f <file>] [-d <drive>] [-n(owait)] [-h(elp)]
		where:	-f <file> - name of disk image file
			-d <drive> - diskette drive to use, must be A or B
			-n - don't prompt for user to insert diskette
			-h - print usage information to stdout

The diskette must be formatted or rawrite will not work.
The contents of the disk do not matter and will be overwritten.

When ran interactively (without command line options) you will be prompted for the disk image filename (you must remember this as there is no file chooser). You will also be prompted for the target/destination drive, either A or B for A: or B: respectively.

Basic Usage (FDImage):

fdimage is an updated DOS program meant to replace rawrite. It does not require a pre-formatted floppy diskette. 

       FDIMAGE - Write disk image to floppy disk
       Version 1.5   Copyright (c) 1996-7 Robert Nordier

       Usage: fdimage [-dqsv] [-f size] [-r count] file drive

         -d         Debug mode
         -f size    Specify the floppy disk format by capacity, eg:
                    160K, 180K, 320K, 360K, 720K, 1.2M, 1.44M, 2.88M
         -q         Quick mode: don't format the disk
         -r count   Retry count for format/write operations
         -s         Single-sector I/O
         -v         Verbose

Common extensions:

Below are common extensions associated with disk image files. While there is no strict rule, generally uncompressed, full length, raw diskette image files are noted as rawrite compatible [RW] and can be used by all programs that manipulate disk images. However, some programs may be limited to 1.44MB or other size images. Various programs support modified image files to reduce the size of the image, including compression (zip, gzip, rle, ...) and truncation of unused (blank) portions.

Recommended:

DskImage: OSPlus Disk Imager (read & write images) for DOS or if you run Win32 then RawWriteWin is great. FreeDOS diskcopy is also a good alternative.

Disk Image Libraries

For DOS:

For Windows:

Unix (and BeOS, QNX?) systems:

Use dd, which should be provided with your distribution. man dd for usage help. (FreeBSD (www.freebsd.org) dd sources included)
dd if=image.flp of=/dev/fd0
if specifies input file and of specifies output file
where /dev/fd0 is the first floppy drive (same as A:) or you may wish to use /dev/fd1 for the second floppy drive (same as B:), though actual device names may vary with the particular Unix System or other Posix compatible OS and image.flp is the filename of the raw image file.
Other options to dd may indicate sector size and count of sectors sized chunks to read/write.

OS/2:

Apple (Apple II, MacOS, OS X):

Atari:

Commercial:

(Trial versions, when available, can be found in trial\ subdirectory)
Please see contents of these archives for their usage (license information) and abide by them.

Accessing images as virtual filesystems

Useful for creating or modifying disk images, or simply to access the contents without writing them to a disk

Partition Imagers:

Others:

If your Platform is not listed here, then feel free to send me some email with information about rawrite type programs (that are free to use & distribute) for me to add here. Also please let me know if you know of others or have any additional information to add to this document. I will also include information on commercial programs and trial versions if available.

Thank you.
Jeremy Davis
jeremyd@computer.org
(This document is public domain, the referenced programs are NOT.)
http://www.fdos.org/ripcord/rawrite/
20040326


Unless otherwise indicated ALL PROGRAMS here are provided without warranty and I take no responsibility for any problems you have as a result of using them.