[conspire] disk imaging programs

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Nick Jennings (nkj at iaminsane.com):

> Have you tried using 'dd'? Just make a boot floppy, like tomsrtbt and
> boot off it....

Sean, he's right:  Using standalone Linux media is really often the
easiest solution.  E.g., if you have access to a CDR burner, you could
use one of the (many) Linux maintenance CD images:

http://www.lnx-bbc.org/  LNX-BBC "bootable business card"
http://rescuecd.sourceforge.net/  Timo's Rescue CD
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html  Knoppix

The last of these three (unlike the other two) isn't a mini-CD, but
rather a full-sized one, and boots an extremely cutting-edge, full
featured Linux desktop distribution that recognises your hardware
automatically and runs a general-usage desktop system entirely from the
CD.  It's very cool:  Because most of the contents are stored
compressed, it actually gives you a couple of gigs of applications,
configured and runnable.

With any of the CD images booted and running, you can then (among other
things) temporarily mount your Windows "C:" drive and write the floppy 
images to disks using good ol' reliable Linux "dd", like this.  (I'll
assume you've put a diskette image in C:\ .)

(Boot one of the CDs.)
mount  -t vfat  /dev/hda1  /mnt
dd  if=/mnt/partboot.raw  of=/dev/fd0  #"if" is input file; "of" is output file

-- 
Cheers,               It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
Rick Moen          It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed,
rick@            The hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning,
linuxmafia.com         It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.