Creating a real 1.4MB floppy from a .dsk image under Windows

[bigmessowires]

HEEEEEEELP! I am pulling my hair out trying to create a Mac-formatted 1.4MB floppy disk on a Windows PC. I know it's supposed to be doable, but I can't figure out how.

I have a System 6.0.8 disk image on the PC, which is a .dsk file. I can open the .dsk file in HFVExplorer and view the contents. So I insert a floppy, and select File->Write Volume to Floppy, select the .dsk image as the source, and the A: floppy drive as the destination. This generates the error message "The file is larger (1474560) than the disk size (0 bytes). The file will be truncated, with unpredictable results. Continue anyway?" Obviously that's not good, and if I continue anyway, nothing gets written to the disk.

I also tried using HFVExplorer to format the floppy in Mac format, using File->Format New Volume. That generates a similar error "Size decreased to the maximum of 0 bytes".

Then I tried the demo of the commerical program MacDisk, but it doesn't seem to work with .dsk images, and it crashed when it tried to access the floppy.

How do other people do this? It seems like it should be a (relatively) simple task, but I'm stumped.

 

[bigmessowires]

I was finally successful using a program called WinImage. It will open .dsk format images directly and write them to floppy. It's a bit short on user-friendliness, but it works.

 

[jongleur]

Rawrite might be what you are/were looking for:

Have a look at http://fdos.info/ripcord/rawrite/ for Rawrite and related floppy disk imaging programs, and quite a list of alternatives and information.

 

[gilles]

for many floppy formats you can also use omniflop http://www.shlock.co.uk/Utils/OmniFlop/OmniFlop.htm

under *nix, just use dd with cryptic options ( like dd if=source.dsk of=/dev/fd0 bs=1400 skip=1 )

 

[PowerPup]

I like using Rawwrite for Windows. Which is just a GUI version of Rawwrite. It hasn't been updated for a while so I don't know how well it works for Vista/7.

 

[bear]

I used to use a free Windows utility called "Winimage". Worked fine for reading and writing 1440 KB Mac floppies.

 

[techknight]

slightly off topic: I used to use a shareware program called GRDUW Disk Utility for windows, you could format those odd-sized DOS diskettes, like the DMF format (type of copy protection), and the 1.7meg floppies.