Cranky old man shouts at cloud. Cloud sneers.

[f15sim]

I bought myself a shiny new copy of SpinRite today after seeing 6.1 finally arrived.

A funny thing happens when you quit reading at "UEFI" - you build a boot disk, copy SpinRite over to it, boot it, and then get told off for not using some special, blessed version of FreeDOS.

The machine I'm using for SpinRite was built long before USB was ever a fever dream, let alone a physical thing.

After much cursing, I grab this "bootable" thing and use RaWrite v1.2 (what I had on the machine) to write out the image. What I get is an unreadable, unbootable disk.

Apparently RaWrite 1.2 isn't good enough, and I've yet to see anyone mention writing a disk on a real DOS machine.

What magic tool* is required in order to write "bootable.img" to a floppy drive that will result in a bootable disk?

[Update! I've been told by a friend of mine that bootable.img isn't a floppy image, so regardless of what tool I try, it won't ever work. Nice.]

[*] Tool must operate under MS-DOS.

Thanks!
g.

 

[PHolder]

Surely your only device is not this ancient thing that runs only MSDOS. SpinRite is a dual mode .EXE and runs under Windows and under DOS. If you run it under Windows, it will help you make boot media for the DOS mode and copy itself into it. Give this a try?

 

[f15sim]

Of course not. However, the only machine I can write floppies on is the machine I want to run the software on.

g.

 

[AlanD]

IIRC Steve decided that any machine with floppies was unlikely to have a disk over 2.2TB, and that 6.0 worked perfectly for smaller disks. It was also discussed that very few machines have floppy drives these days, so the floppy handling code was removed from 6.1. BICBW.

 

[ColbyBouma]

IIRC Steve decided that any machine with floppies was unlikely to have a disk over 2.2TB, and that 6.0 worked perfectly for smaller disks. It was also discussed that very few machines have floppy drives these days, so the floppy handling code was removed from 6.1. BICBW.

6.1 removed support for scanning floppies, but you can still run 6.1 from a floppy. The Windows side of 6.1 still has options for directly creating a floppy disk and writing an IMG file that can be written to floppy later. This works with USB floppy drives.

 

[ColbyBouma]

The machine I'm using for SpinRite was built long before USB was ever a fever dream, let alone a physical thing.

What are the specs of that machine? 6.1's requirements are larger than 6.0. It needs around 64 MB of RAM and a Pentium or newer CPU.

 

[f15sim]

I was today years old when I learned an MS-DOS executable could co-exist with a Windows executable in the same binary image. Neat! Thanks for the clue by four.

The machines that I have that run Windows do not possess floppy drives. Is there a mechanism available to get SpinRite to just write an image file instead of demanding a diskette to write on?

The machine I want to use SpinRite with has enough RAM.

tnx!

g.

 

[f15sim]

I scrounged up a USB floppy drive. I'm in business now. Thanks all. Apologies for the noise.

g.

 

[ColbyBouma]

There's no need to apologize. This forum exists so we can share knowledge and help each other solve problems