Monday, August 3, 2009

Creating a Floppy Image in Windows

It's not too often any more that we need a floppy drive image created, but there are times (such as when accessing a server through iLO) when it's handy to have a virtual floppy drive.

There are a lot of shareware and commercial programs out there that will create a .img file from other files on your file system, but I had a hard time finding a free floppy image creation package. BFI (Build Floppy Image), thank goodness, still is around. It's a very easy-to-use floppy image creation command line tool that is fully free. 

It's old, and it's unsupported, but it works.
Rather than hosting the files here, I'll link to BFI's home page. If you find that the page or files are down, let me know, and I'll post it here. Turns out the home page link finally went away.  Here's a link to the download.

In short, what you do is put the files you want to write to your image in their own directory.
Here's an example of its usage. Say I want to create a floppy image file at c:\temp\myfloppy.img, containing all of the files in c:\temp\floppyfiles. The command I'd use to do this is:

bfi -f=c:\temp\myfloppy.img c:\temp\floppyfiles

That's it. Enjoy your new (free and legal) floppy disk image!

27 comments:

  1. Thanks Lane! I found this one very VERY useful! BTW it's interesting how VMware Server 2 asks for .flp type of image, but still works as a charm if you simply change extension .img > .flp ;>

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  2. Thank you very much for showcasing this handy little tool, helped me a lot!

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  3. finally my search ended here...thanx a lot!!

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  4. Hallo and thankyou from Germany Hamburg

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  5. This is incredibly useful.

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  6. It seems to be gone as of 11 Dec 2014 - "Server not found".

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for the heads-up. I'm still finding it's working OK, but I'll keep my eye on it.

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  7. Linked site is down.

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  8. Linked side doesn't exist anymore, could you please give us another link, or maybe an alternatively tool?

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    1. You're right: it's down. I've updated the post with a link to the file. Thanks for the heads-up!

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  9. Still useful. Who would have thought in 2018 I would still need a floppy disk for something? (SparQ Drive)

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  10. Thank you so much!!

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  12. 2021 and still useful. Thank You, Lane, from all my heart! - Roman Parshin

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  13. 2022 still going strong. Thank you so much. Regards.

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  14. This was the most helpful site for updating my BIOS with a Gotek floppy emulator. Thanks!

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  19. This link (https://web.archive.org/web/20051216040954/http://www.nu2.nu/download.php?sFile=bfi10.zip) through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine still allows you to download BFI10.zip.

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