Creating a Floppy Image
Make an image file of a floppy disk (FreeBSD 5.2)
Posted 23.11.2005 | Updated 23.05.2006 | Contributed by Nick Fratangelo


Why would you want to make an image file of a floppy disk? Well probably you wouldn't.

However, some of my colleagues are working on a PXE boot server, where workstations boot to the network and grab instructions from this DHCP server on how to proceed.

The boot instructions are in turn based on code originally sitting on a bootable floppy disk.

Apart from storing images of BSD setup floppies, this is probably one of the few reasons I can think of to make an image of a floppy disk.

The method used varies slightly with the version of FreeBSD used, so to start with perform the following check..

cd /dev

Next perform an ls -la

- if you can see /fd0 then go straight to the command below. However if you can only see directories such as /fd/0, /fd/1, /fd/2, etc. then reboot the system and select the boot option which contains the line,

"2) Boot FreeBSD with ACPI disabled"

Once booted, run the following command..

dd if=filename.img of=/dev/fd0

.. where filename.img is the name of the floppy image file. And that's it. The image file will be created in the local directory.



- N.