• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Mounting .IMAs/floppy images under DOS as virtual drives?

S

sgifanatic

Experienced Member
Joined
Sep 11, 2014
Messages
136
Location
Texas
Many of the abandonware sites provide multi-floppy installers as a series of image files. If you're running these on a hypervisor, it's easy to associate them with a virtual drive. But on a physical system, is there a way to copy the .IMA files to the hard drive, and then mount them as a virtual floppy drive under DOS? Would save a lot of floppies and time.
 
If you have one of the XT-IDE devices, or any device that uses the XTIDE Universal BIOS, you can use a serial cable as a virtual drive connected to your PC. You can even override the internal drive letter to set the virtual drive as the A: drive.

Check out the SerialDrive functionality:
https://code.google.com/p/xtideuniversalbios/wiki/SerialDrives

I'm going to make a video of this functionality when I get some time. I think it's one very underrated feature of the XTIDE BIOS. :)

Unfortunately, I don't know of any software that allows you to do this from within DOS.

Heather
 
I haven't found a program for virtual floppies but you could try copying the contents of all the floppy disks to one directory and run the install from there (or from a CD, CF card, etc). A lot of dos installers don't care and just will not ask for the other disks, some will. I think the problem with using a virtual floppy in dos would be swapping them on demand.

Another slightly roudabout way you could try is to install the virtual floppies on a Win9x virtual machine then use an old version of WinRAR (Win3.1 compatible) to create an SFX archive of the installed directory and run it on the real machine in dos. Other versions of Windows may work as long as they aren't 64bit. I had to use a similar method to install programs I no longer had disks for, using split 1.4mb archives and real floppies.
 
I, too, have been looking for this for a long time. It would be less wear and tear when I perform archiving; I currently dump a disk using image read methods, then I read from the disk again for disks with filesystems so I can get the individual files into a .zip archive. If I had a way of mounting/unmounting an image to a virtual drive letter, that would be much more efficient.

Maybe another round of scouring simtel and garbo mirrors... or maybe FreeDOS has a device driver/TSR for this? I'd love to know... I'd write a TSR for this myself if I knew anything about DOS device drivers...
 
Trixter said:
I, too, have been looking for this for a long time. It would be less wear and tear when I perform archiving; I currently dump a disk using image read methods, then I read from the disk again for disks with filesystems so I can get the individual files into a .zip archive. If I had a way of mounting/unmounting an image to a virtual drive letter, that would be much more efficient.

Maybe another round of scouring simtel and garbo mirrors... or maybe FreeDOS has a device driver/TSR for this? I'd love to know... I'd write a TSR for this myself if I knew anything about DOS device drivers...
Click to expand...

Sounds like you're looking for Turbo Image. Search for TI101A.ZIP
 
Krille said:
Sounds like you're looking for Turbo Image. Search for TI101A.ZIP
Click to expand...

Indeed, this is perfect! Let's just crack this WHAT THE 2MB XMS REQUIRED?!

Good thing the source is included. I'll see how difficult this will be to adapt to EMS (which is actually possible on an 808x system). EDIT: Too time-consuming. Plus, no command-line mount/unmount which is really what I need (for batch files).

I guess my next option is to write something that can burst open disk images as files in a directory. Hopefully, that also already exists and I won't have to reinvent the wheel.

EDIT2: Never mind, looks like simtel has this:

Code: 
extrac21.zip   33824 09-30-96  EXTRACT v2.10: Extracts files from disk image

Problem solved (for me) :)
 
Last edited:
Trixter said:
EDIT2: Never mind, looks like simtel has this:

Code: 
extrac21.zip   33824 09-30-96  EXTRACT v2.10: Extracts files from disk image

Problem solved (for me) :)
Click to expand...

Problem not solved; the executable uses 286 instructions (I see ENTER/LEAVE, for example). So this is not an option on 8086 hardware.

Anyone know of a utility that can extract files from a raw disk image (or, ideally, allows you to mount the raw disk image from the command-line to get at the files) that works on 8086 hardware?
 
I'm still surprised that more people don't use the SerDrive functionality built into the XTIDE Universal BIOS. You can mount virtual disks, including IMG files, using a serial cable between an old PC and new machine. It's also faster than a real floppy drive if both systems have high speed serial ports.

https://code.google.com/archive/p/xtideuniversalbios/wikis/SerialDrives.wiki

Another neat thing is that you can use disk images that are larger than what a system supports natively. For example, I was able to use SerDrive to install MS-DOS 6.22 from 1.44MB floppy images even though my 8088 system had a maximum physical drive limit of 720K. Also, since it's a hardware solution, you can boot from disk images. You can even make a simple batch file to make swapping to a new disk image easier.

Heather
 
Trixter said:
Anyone know of a utility that can extract files from a raw disk image (or, ideally, allows you to mount the raw disk image from the command-line to get at the files) that works on 8086 hardware?
Click to expand...

I finally solved my problem: shfdrv86.exe by Jason Hood does exactly what I need it to do. It lets you mount a floppy image as a drive letter so you can get at the files on it, and you can unmount it later. Tested working on my 808x PC.
 
I have made an utility also for 8086 that is able to Mount and also BOOT the floppy. No EMS/XMS needed.
Useful for PC-BOOTER old games. It need some tuning for i.e. multiple floppy mounting or partition image mounting.

Ask if anyone need it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top