making a proper image for floppy

[EvBladeRunnervE]

Ok, what I need to know is : what is the proper way to make an image for a floppy. The reason being is that I am in the process of developing an operating system, and I need what is put on the floppy to be totally contiguous. I have seen programs like rawwrite, but they only write a single image or a file.

So in the end, I am looking for a program that in of itself creats an image and can write it, or a program to create an image with the specifications I laid out. I have looked on google searching for such things of "floppy image creation" and "image creation out of files" with no luck.

thanks guys

[Waldo2k2]

fd has a pretty active OS dev board, go check it out, im sure there's some stuff covered in there already

[Salem]

> I have seen programs like rawwrite, but they only write a single image or a file.
So write what you want to a file (using fwrite/fseek) then write that file to floppy using rawrite

[anonytmouse]

On NTx:

	hDrive = CreateFile(TEXT("\\\\.\\A:"), GENERIC_WRITE, FILE_SHARE_READ | FILE_SHARE_WRITE,
	                    NULL, OPEN_EXISTING, FILE_FLAG_WRITE_THROUGH, NULL);

will open A: drive for raw writing. Raw read/write samples are available here. You can write/read whole sectors (512 bytes for a floppy) only.

[VirtualAce]

Hey Ev just use abswrite in DOS mode. It only works with FAT, however, so if you want NTFS you are out of luck. Besides I'm not sure NTFS can be used on floppies.

I use to have a program that would allow you to save the bootstrap, modify it, and/or switch it with another 512 byte bootstrap as you wanted to.

This helped me test out my new bootstrap code as I developed it. Let me look on my drive for it. All you really need to do is read the first 512 bytes from sector 0 using and absread and then write that to a binary file. If I can't find the code I'll rewrite it for you.