Winimage img/ima are just raw sector dumps. You don't need anything special to write them to disk.

Under Linux the standard 'dd' command should suffice (to both create and write back), your nearest equivalent on Windows is probably rawrite.

That's with standard floppy controllers and/or usb floppy drives. Does the catweasel show as a standard floppy drive when installed?

megatron-uk wrote on 2024-03-23, 18:42:

Winimage img/ima are just raw sector dumps. You don't need anything special to write them to disk.

Win-Image can not address floppy-drives connected to a catweasel-controller.
New machines do not support two floppys in the bios. that's my point.
I need to write all images via software for the catweasel and that does not work for Winimage files,
these directly crash the catweasel-software so these images need to be convertet in a format that
the catweasel controller can write...only way out is using a different (older) machine.

Doc

USB floppy drive. You can read and write sector based image files without issues. At least on Linux you can.

No special software or hardware is necessary to create or write them back.

megatron-uk wrote on 2024-03-24, 10:42:

USB floppy drive. You can read and write sector based image files without issues. At least on Linux you can.
No special software or hardware is necessary to create or write them back.

No 5,25" USB Floppy Drive available. I currently transfer diskimages to the real machine and write the pc-booters directly to the drive.

Ah, now if you had said 5.25" support was needed I wouldn't have bothered replying with that.

I keep a P4 era machine around as a transfer box with native 3.5 and 5.25 floppy drives.

Not sure there is a better solution for 5.25 disks.

Try compressing the floppies. If you have Win98, you can install DriveSpace and compress floppies. It's under Accessories->System in the Start menu. If you don't have it, you can use the Add/Remove Programs control panel. If you have a later version of Windows, Google "WinMount archiver." It can create compressed archives and treat them as a virtual drive. Unfortunately, when it modifies an archive, it requires extra space to store the new archive file, but I have a batch file that gets around this by first copying the file to a temporary folder on the hard drive, mounting it from there then copying the new file back to the origin. Does this help?