NTRawrite, fdvol, wrtdsk
For reasons of my own I make Linux boot floppies in Windows. The Debian Web
docs (see excerpt below) cast doubt on NTRawrite and lists first the ancient
boot floppy programs fdvol and wrtdsk that only work under MS-DOS and OS/2.
I'm sure those will live forever somewhere, but ordinary users today would
be concerned about Windows I think. Is there a reason Wichmann didn't update
the docs in section "4.3.2 Writing Disk Images From DOS, Windows, or OS/2"
of his October 5th revision to give appropriate priority to Windows?
Despite what the Debian docs imply, NTRawrite works fine. However, NTRawrite
is inconvenient because it doesn't automate the process of making disk sets
and isn't very friendly to first-time users. About a week ago I built a new
tool that overcomes these issues. My question is, does it matter?
Would anyone besides me use this sort of thing? Should I release my (open
source) Windows boot disk copying tool? Would the Debian Web page get
appropriately updated?
Cheers,
Robin
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*** Relevant section from Ingo Wichmann's post:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2002/debian-boot-200210/msg00069.html
4.3.2 Writing Disk Images From DOS, Windows, or OS/2
If you have access to an i386 machine, you can use one of the following
programs to copy images to floppies.
The FDVOL, WrtDsk or RaWrite3 programs can be used under MS-DOS.
http://www.minix-vmd.org/pub/Minix-vmd/dosutil/
To use these programs, first make sure that you are booted into DOS. Trying
to use these programs from within a DOS box in Windows, or double-clicking
on these programs from the Windows Explorer is not expected to work. If you
don't know how to boot into DOS, just hit F8 while booting.
NTRawrite is an attempt to create a contemporary version of Rawrite/Rawrite3
that is compatible with WinNT and Win2K. It is a self-explanatory GUI
application; you select the disk drive to write to, browse to the disk image
you want to place there and hit the Write button.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ntrawrite/
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