Tip

How to quickly make a floppy disk (flp) file

You may wish to create a blank floppy disk in an flp format suitable for a VM to write to. Perhaps a process requires it, such as the recovery disks or an install of Partition Magic or Volume Manager. This method does not require a physical floppy disk.

This method doesn’t require any software such as winimage

  1. Logon to the Service Console as ROOT
  2. Create an empty file which is 1440KB in size with:dd if=/dev/zero of=/vmimages/blankdisk.flp bs=1k count=1440
  3. Then build a vfat file system for the flp file:mkfs.vfat /vmimages/blankdisk.flpNote:
    Browse to and connect to the flp file within the VM.

     

    Note:
    If you wished to access this floppy file from the Service Console use:

    mount -t vfat -o loop /vmimages/blankdisk.flp /mnt/floppy

 

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This was first published in January 2005

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