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Win98SE: emulate floppy drive from .img files?

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First post, by Harry Potter

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Hi! I have a Windows 98SE tower at my mother's house but am not there right now. I want to install some programs on it from the internet. However, most of them are in disk image format. Somebody here PMed me and told me about a tool that can extract the contents of such files. I need to look for that message. Is there a way to emulate a floppy drive and use those files as disks? It has a floppy drive, but I don't want to make out those disks if I don't have to. I'm asking because some programs can only install from disks: I can't install them from a directory on the hard drive. I leatned this from trials with DOSBox-X. Thank you.

Joseph Rose, a.k.a. Harry Potter
Working magic in the computer community

Reply 1 of 6, by wbahnassi

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Nope. The best you can do is extract the contents of the IMG files using WinImage or 7-zip. There is no floppy drive emulator for Windows AFAIK.

I suggest you install a VM with a DOS VHD and use that to install the disks from their IMG files. Once installed, open the VHD in Win11 and copy out the installed files and send them to your Win98 using networking.

Probably the above can be done easier with DOSBox-X as well. Just mount the images, install the software, then take its installed files and copy them over to Win98 machine.

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Reply 2 of 6, by weedeewee

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It seems win9x is annoying in this regard.

For NT & higher there's
https://vfd.sourceforge.net/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/imdisk-toolkit/
https://www.osforensics.com/tools/mount-disk-images.html

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Reply 3 of 6, by Jo22

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This post is interesting.
https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.p … 1bf3b2f#p474362

It might be possible one day to support floppy emulation in Windows 9x.
It needs sort a helper driver, still.

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Reply 4 of 6, by Harry Potter

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Okay. I thank all of you for your help. 😀

Joseph Rose, a.k.a. Harry Potter
Working magic in the computer community

Reply 5 of 6, by akimmet

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Depending on how clever the install program is, abusing the SUBST command may be enough to fool the install program.

Reply 6 of 6, by Harry Potter

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Okay, but some such programs have multiple disks and have a method to determine which disk is in the drive. But then again, I can install them on DOSBox-X and then copy them over to the computer. Thank you.

Joseph Rose, a.k.a. Harry Potter
Working magic in the computer community

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