Blank disk image creation

[morelenmir]

As part of getting back in to RISCOS I have begun to explore 'Arculator' and seem to have the basics sorted out. However unlike many emulators there does not seem to be a native process to create blank floppy-drive images. Am I missing something? Alternately I wonder if anyone could suggest a third party programme for doing so?

As of yet I have only found programmes such as 'ArcImg' and 'OmniFlop' for creating cloned images from real diskettes, not producing empty images of a given size.

[flaxcottage]

I don't know of a third party piece of software for this.

I had the same problem using RPCemu, so I used OmniFlop to archive an 800K disc and a 1.6M disc. This created two ADF images which I loaded into RPCemu and deleted the contents giving me two blank images.

They can be downloaded from the RISCOS section of the educational archive (link in the signature below).

[danielj]

These are just sector images, so you can get away with an empty file of the correct size then "format" it - either 800kb or 1.6mb. In so far as getting that file, format an existing disk image to blank it, or here are a variety of methods in Unix/MacOS to make a file of a specific size:
https://ostechnix.com/create-files-certain-size-linux/

And under windows:
https://winaero.com/create-file-specifi ... indows-10/

Edit - just to confirm, under windows at an admin command prompt I did

Code: Select all

fsutil file createnew test.adf 819200

Then loaded it as the disk in arculator, formatted it to 800kb and it worked fine. For 1.6mb you'll need to use 1638400 as the number of bytes

d.

[morelenmir]

Many thanks indeed chaps!!!

I was wondering if it was just a case of perhaps using a hexeditor--but it makes things easier still if there is no header data to fudge.

[geraldholdsworth]

You'll be pleased to know that I'm currently working on creating ADFS blank images with the Disc Image Manager. So far, it can do ADFS S, M, L and D. By the time I post this version on GitHub, it should also be doing E, E+, F and F+.

But I also use the above method for creating blank images, then hex dump them, to look at the numbers, to make sure that Disc Image Manager will create a proper formatted image.

(although under macOS, it is mkfile -n <size> <filename> e.g. mkfile -n 1600K ADFS_F.adf)

[sirbod]

However unlike many emulators there does not seem to be a native process to create blank floppy-drive images. Am I missing something? Alternately I wonder if anyone could suggest a third party programme for doing so?

If you have an existing ADF, copy it, mount it with Arculator and then format it to create a blank ADF.

If you don't have a donor ADF, use ADFFS to create blank ADF's within RISC OS.