How to create Virtual Box floppy disk images without any cruft!

[Jean-Yves]

Hi,

I'm trying to create disk images of the retail copy of CA-Realizer 2.0 which I managed to buy recently. Amazingly I was able top copy over the files from all 7 installation diskettes.

For the diskette image, I downloaded the empty floppy image package from archive.org [1]

Initially I used the 2.88MB empty file but ArcaOS (in VirtualBox 7 on Linux) fails to read these. I get a "SYS0027: The drive cannot find the sector (area) requested." error when I try to go to A:

So I guess first question is - can ArcaOS read 2.88MB floppies?

Assuming not, I did then try to use the 1.44MB empty image but I was getting a not enough space error on disk4 (of 7).   What's the best way in Linux to copy the contents of a directory into a disk image file?

Incidentally, the way I copied the files from the diskettes was using a USB floppy drive and drag and dropping all files from the floppy into 7 directories on Zorin 17 Linux using the file manager (ie I did not use the terminal). 
(I know macOS adds all kinds of nonsense when copying files, which is why I did this in Linux.)
ls -al does not show anything added as far as I can tell.

Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks

[1] https://archive.org/details/blank-floppy-disks

[ivan]

It sounds as if you need EMT4PM to create your disks.  That package did everything I needed with manipulating floppy disks and their images.  Now I have everything stored on a set of 2 tb disks.

[Steven Levine]

The 2.88MB diskettes should be XDF format.  To read these, you need the XDF filter driver installed.  See:

  https://www.os2world.com/forum/index.php?topic=1902.0

I don't recall if the filter supported write operations.

[RTAN]

Hi Jean-Yves,

Alternatively you could simply download the images directly from here:
https://archive.org/details/ca-realizer-2.0-for-windows-os2

I guarantee you that they're bit-for-bit identical to the floppy disks in the box... because this is exactly who you think it is!

Best,
Richard.

[Jean-Yves]

Ahah!  Well that’s good news.

Thanks Richard 

Ivan, Steven, many thanks for that info. All good to know.

[Dave Yeo]

The 2.88MB diskettes should be XDF format.  To read these, you need the XDF filter driver installed.  See:

  https://www.os2world.com/forum/index.php?topic=1902.0

I don't recall if the filter supported write operations.

XDF format was 1.8 or 1.9 MB crammed into a 1.44MB disk, used by the OS/2 floppy install. I can't remember if they were writeable or if loaddskf/savedskf supported them.

[Steven Levine]

You are correct for standard media.  Not entirely unexpectedly, Michal has written a bit about this topic

  http://www.os2museum.com/wp/the-xdf-diskette-format/

  http://www.os2museum.com/wp/floppy-capacity-math/

[Jean-Yves]

I've hit another problem.

I downloaded the images from archive.org, renamed them all to .img so that Vbox would understand them, and then run the installer. However,  because my virtual hard drive is 4GB, the installer program free-space checking routine has an overflow error and reports -1295516K available (note the minus sign).

Is there a way around this, short of creating a second VM, installing on a smaller hard disk and then copying the installed files and config.sys entries over?  Does anyone know whether any other config files are amended/created?

The installer is a .exe so not modifiable rexx.

What's the max HDD size that OS/2 circa 1993 knew about, does anyone know? Should I play safe and give it just 500MB? I've a feeling that ArcaOS wants more though?

[RTAN]

Hi Jean-Yves,

You could try creating an *additional* virtual hard drive of a smaller size, say 1GB, and attach that as a Drive-D to your existing VM. Then try installing on Drive-D (instead of Drive-C).

Alternatively you could temporarily shrink the partition of your Drive-C to get past the installer check, then grow it again. Unfortunately whilst I know that older versions of Partition Magic can resize HPFS partitions (e.g. Partition Magic 4) I'm not aware if there are any that can resize the ArcaOS partition type.

Best,
Richard.

[Dave Yeo]

Hi Jean-Yves, if you add a drive, 2GB is likely the limit you want to stay below as usually these installers use 32 bit signed variables, any number over about 2GB shows as a negative number.
You can try installing https://ecsoft2.org/vcompat and see if that helps

[Jean-Yves]

Many thanks both. I’ll report back how it goes.

[Jean-Yves]

So in the end I decided to just re-install ArcaOS 5.1 with a 2GB drive instead of 4GB.

The installer ran and disk1 completed, then when it asked for disk 2, it repeatedly failed to accept A: as a drive, saying it could not find the path and asking for it again, defaulting to a corrupted path of a "C" with some kind of cedilla, a 6 and then a small diamond character.



I then mapped a shared folder and in that placed 7 directories with the disks 1-7 files in the appropriate one. My thinking was that since the installer prompts for the location of each disk, I did not need to use the floppy images.   Again, same error

Since the image files were made from the same set of diskettes that I now have and both the images and raw files have this issue, can we assume that something on the original installer is corrupt?

Richard did you manage to install from the images your end?

[Neil Waldhauer]

CA Realizer 3.0 is 32-bit, and CA Realizer 1.0 is 16-bit. I don't know about version 2.0. If you were targeting OS/2 1.x, 2 GB might still be too large. When I ran OS/2 1.x, an 80 MB drive was "huge".

[Jean-Yves]

Hi Neil, from what I can tell in the docs, 2.0 is 32-bit so should work fine.

My understanding is that 3.0 is Windows-only. Is that incorrect?

[David Graser]

I don't know how many disks you are dealing with.

I have used VFdisk located at

http://hobbesarchive.com/Home/Download?path=/Hobbes/pub/os2/system/drivers/filesys/VFDISK_6-0.zip

Install it and set up a 2.88 virtual disk with it. Copy all the files from disk 1 and 2 and run install.

I have used this before because I no longer have floppy drives.