Windows 3.1 Floppy Disk Image Download
Alayna Rother
You don't need a license for WinImage. The free version only lacks features you are not going to use anyway. It's what I'd recommend if you do the imaging on a Windows system. Get version 8.5, that was the best one ( ).
Whats the best utility to use when needed re-read again and again to get the data from a floppy disk?? Something that can do low-level reading. So if the disk is bad, so still could get all the data from the disk.
The older version seems to not being available (dont know if there is something which could run on a 8086 or 286 as well.)
If i could buy a license i would do if the software is great working with.
On a modern PC, I'm using WinImage 8.x (previously 6.x) occasionally. On Windows, of course.
Mac and Linux still lack a user friendly counterpart (except for special solutions such as FC5025 or KyroFlux).
There are different floppy controllers with different capabilities. I found the PC8477 to be great, you can find it sometimes on Adaptec ISA SCSI cards or you can build yourself a Floppy interface. I did some few years ago -si-pcxt-3-disketov-radic/, the projects are Open Source.
WinImage is a fully-fledged disk-imaging suite for easy creation, reading and editing of many image formats and fileystems, including DMF, VHD, FAT, ISO, NTFS and Linux. The disk image is an exact copy of a physical disk (floppy, CD-ROM, hard disk, USB, VHD disk, etc.) or a partition that preserves the original structure. With WinImage in place, you can recreate the disk image on the hard drive or other media, view its content, extract image-based files, add new files and directories, change the format, and defragment the image. All this and more is delivered in one intuitive user interface that enables imaging right out of the box.
The program has many utilitarian uses at home and in the office. As a serious PC user, you probably have tons of old but still useful floppy disks. With WinImage in place, you can turn them into disk images, which can be stored on the hard drive and recreated, when a need arises. In combination with a CD creating tool, WinImage can help you create your own custom boot disk with hardware diagnostic or virus cleaning software to bring a problem PC back up and running without being in Windows. As a hard-disk backup solution, WinImage allows you to save hours and even days restoring a system and configurations on a machine that has experienced a hard-disk crash or software corruption. Along with homes and offices, this ability is a must for training classes, where restoring torn down PC configurations quickly is critical.
WinImage is an ASP shareware program.
WinImage has many cool features!
Just recently I upgraded one of my computers from Windows 7 to Windows 10. The upgrade went smoothly except for 1 problem. I often need to run and or/check old MS-DOS software in floppy disk images. In Windows 7 I would use Virtual PC 2007 to do this. Problem was, Windows 10 doesn't support Virtual PC 2007. I tried various workarounds like this one, but they didn't work for me.
I went searching for alternatives. There are certainly virtualisation alternatives around, but many seemed too industrial from my kind of use (e.g. VMWare Workstation, which was only available for 64-bit environments), and/or they didn't support floppy disk images. Finally I found one that did...
MS-DOS seems to be the simplest OS that VM VirtualBox supports and there are no "Guest additions" or extension packs for it...but at least it provides 3.5 inch floppy disk support which is what I was looking for. Huzzah!
There are a few solutions for this. One is Winimage. If you want to have a floppy drive image attached to your modern OS though and have software interact with it, ImDisk is a good choice. It creates a virtual drive and assigns a letter to it. Not only can it read "PC-type" floppy images but also CD-ROMS and hard drives.
So, if running intel-based software from floppy disk images in a 32-bit Windows 10 environment is a problem for you, Oracle VM VirtualBox (at least at the time of writing) seems to solve it. If you just want to move files, try Winimage. If you want the OS and programs to interact with your disk image then ImDisk will do the job.
I have an old laptop with only a floppy drive. It came with Windows 95 on it but suffered from some terrible BSoDs that I could not resolve. I figured I would just download some Windows 95 install disks and reformat it, but apparently those disks were a special type and format that held more than 1440 KiB. The floppies I have are incapable of being formatted that way.
Is there any other way to make Windows 95 install disks that fit onto standard disks? Or is there some way I can split these into smaller files and then copy them all onto the HD and then join them up again and install it that way?
You need the disk images that use 21 floppies, not 13. Originally Win95 came on 21 1.44mb disks, and it wasn't until later that it moved to the 13 DMF format disks. However, do you really not have an old external CD drive laying around? That would be far easier.
As Stephen Kitt mentioned, if you have enough floppies, you can make a ZIP file of the installation directory and span it over several floppies. This way you can use whatever disks you happen to have hanging around and don't have to worry if they contain bad sectors as much (those disks simply will hold slightly less.) As the CAB files are already compressed, don't worry too much about compression levels: the difference between level 0 and level 9 will be very small. An additional benefit is that PKUNZIP will tell you if there are errors in the archive, so you don't end up with corrupted installation files on the other end.
However, as you mentioned getting blue screen errors previously, I would look into why you got the the errors in the first place before installing Windows 95, as they could be indicative of hardware issues.
This example take the file bootload.bin and places it at the beginning of the disk image (called disk.img in this case) without truncation (conv=notrunc) If you don't use conv=notrunc on a virtual disk image it will write bootload.bin and truncate disk image to the size of the bootloader.
DD also has the ability to write to specific parts of a a disk image by jumping to a point other than the beginning of the disk. This is useful if you need to place information (code/data) in a particular sector. This example could be used to place the second stage of a boot loader after the first 512 byte sector of the disk image:
bs=512 sets the block size to 512 (makes it easier since it is the typical size of most floppy disk sector). seek=1 seeks to the first block (512 bytes) past the beginning of the image and then writes the file stage2.bin . We need conv=notrunc again because we don't want DD to truncate the disk image at the point where stage2.bin ends.
If you are running on Microsoft Windows there is a version of the DD utility available here . The latest download is dd-0.6beta3.zip and is the minimum recommended version. It has some features older ones didn't. Just open the zip file and extract it to a place on your Windows path.
I'm sure i've saved the first 512 bytes from e.g. a Windows 98 floppy, which had said Starting Windows 98 then gone to a C prompt. And it can be changed to e.g. a Windows 95 floppy. You know XP can have a 3 file boot disk if there is a problem with one of 3 core files.. Well, that has a distinct boot sector. IT's not a dos boot disk. I recall that the format command in XP is different from the one in 98. The 98 one was like DOS one it had a format /s to make a system disk. The XP I think couldn't really.. And I notice Win7 format command can't either. Though in XP or 7 I think you can make a dos boot disk from the GUI by ticking a box after right clicking A in 'my computer'. Another thing you could use is the *nix style dd command. or ddrescue(which gives some more info than dd). A similar program is Bart's BBIE, which can take the bootable part of a CD and extract it. Nero was(and perhaps still is), able to take the boot sector of a floppy, 512 bytes, and create a CD based on it. So if you had a bootable DOS disk, you could make a bootable DOS CD. It had an option both to let you browse to the image with that boot record, or to just put the floppy in and let it extract it.
Hi, I'm back. I have DOSbox version 0.72 and I'm trying to install Windows 3.xx into DOSbox using my *IMA files that I created of my original Windows 3.xx floppy 3.5-inch diskettes, but I'm having no luck even though I'm following Dominus's walkthrough that I've found here on VOGONS in the DOSbox section. Later today I'll insert a screenshot (if this is possible) of the messages I get when I try mounting the first Windows diskette *IMA file.
(edit) Ok, I've uploaded the screenshots of the messeges I get at each try, and I've included a link to download the screenshot of what my Win31 directory looks like on my laptop's C:\ drive. I made these diskette image files using WinImage81 (I think it's WinImage81) If you see anything wrong with these pictures/what I did, please correct me. Thank you very much!
Qbix, I do have all the diskette image files in my Win 31 directory, & I tried to install them--it didn't work (see screenshots). I'm afraid I don't exactly understand what you mean, "just copy all the files into 1 directory and install them." isn't that what I did?--Take a look at my screenshots, and tell me what I'm doing wrong and the right way to do this. Thanks.
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