Win32 Disk Imager? 🤷‍♂️

On Linux, there's "Gnome Disks" which uses Gnome Disk Utility.
It works similar to Win32 Disk Imager.

First, Id play around with it in a vm.
It's faster.
Img could mean anything. It could mean something vmware/hyperv can simply recognise and run, It could mean a raw dd, or it could be a proprietary format.
I'd fire up a 9x vm, and attempt to add the Img as a second drive first.
If it works you can back it up in any other format you like,or browse it.

Roadkil's Sector Editor (Windows) or Norton Disk Edit (DOS) would be two options

linux's dd tool. But only if it is a hard disk image.

If this is a cdrom .img (they do exist), then you need some CD authoring tool instead.

I've converted the IMG file to a VirtualBox hard disk and it does boot. Gives some errors about missing files, but I attribute that to the shittiness that is trying to get Windows 95 related stuff to work on VirtualBox. Only problem is it's all in german, since it was a german company, and I'm a little rusty on that. Gonna have to google translate most of this.

Now I just need to figure out how to get it on a IDE hard disk without having to buy a IDE to SATA adapter. I don't really know anything about Linux, so think that's a no go. Win32 Disk Imager says its intended use is for removable media, aka USB drives and flash cards.

Your ide pc boot from usb? CD?
Simplest is http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/
Use modern vm to back up the "second drive" and then restore on hardware.

Alternatively, copy all the files onto usb/CD, sys c: from 9x dos and copy the files. The only thing that's important on fat is the boot sector, iosys,msdossys,commandcom.
Everything else can be copied.

myne wrote on 2025-02-05, 14:01:

Your ide pc boot from usb? CD? Simplest is http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/ Use modern vm to back up the "second drive" and then […]
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Your ide pc boot from usb? CD?
Simplest is http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/
Use modern vm to back up the "second drive" and then restore on hardware.

Alternatively, copy all the files onto usb/CD, sys c: from 9x dos and copy the files. The only thing that's important on fat is the boot sector, iosys,msdossys,commandcom.
Everything else can be copied.

Can boot from CD, not USB

The problem with straight copying is that the disk image has partitions set up in a certain way, and I’d have to first set up my disk the same way before copying. I feel like it’d be a pain trying to make that work.

Okay, I've wasted a lot of time trying stuff that didn't work

What worked eventually was Imgburn. It lets you burn an image to CD as a bootable floppy disk or hard drive. If you have a PC that can boot from CD, it will act basically as if the CD is a floppy or a hard drive. I think this is the solution that does what I need.

JustRob wrote on 2025-02-05, 13:44:

Win32 Disk Imager says its intended use is for removable media, aka USB drives and flash cards.

Obviously. I didn't expect it to say it's also meant for vintage HDDs attached to an USB-PATA converter. That's.. very niche and not very 2025, after all. 🙁
HDDs as such are an anachronism these days.

What Win32 Disk Imager does is similar to what "dd" does on Linux. It reads/writes raw sectors.
I've also got an SATA copier device that does same. You have source/destination device and a copy button.

And at least on Windows, an USB HDD should appear to be a removable medium like any other.
If the HDD controller accepts any weird drive geometry, is another question of course.
Also depends on the USB-HDD bridge chip of the HDD enclosure/USB converter, I do assume, some do use an translation.

That way I got an 8TB USB HDD to work on Windows XP, for example.
It works with just that one external HDD here, because the older enclosure does additional translation.

Anyway, here's an utilities that does explicitly mention HDD support.
.. And It's being inspired by Win32 Disk Imager (sorry, couldn't resist!) 🙂

"A handy Windows tool for writing a disk images to the physical devices (HDD, SSD, USB sticks or SD/CF cards)."

https://github.com/raspopov/VisualDiskImager

That helps, but I have no idea what I need to make this work… SATA to IDE? IDE to USB?

Actually, I have a SCSI2SD set up on one of my computers that works as a bootable device. Maybe I’ll try imaging an SD card with the hard disk image I got. No idea if that works, but I can boot anything from Windows 95 to XP from SD cards, so maybe this too. The only question then is if the booted SD card will even see the IDE hard drive that’s also connected

Edit: yeah, that worked. Funny thing, this disk image comes built in with a tool called PowerQuest DriveCopy 2.0. And it allows you to do exactly what that says. Sooo I was able to pretty much clone the SD card drive to the IDE drive.

Downside: I don’t think this disk image actually enables me to do what I thought it would do, install a OEM store version of Windows 95. Or maybe it does, and I can’t figure out how it works. I’ve pretty much typed the whole thing over in Google translate, but still, it’s kinda hard to decipher.