Working with IMA floppy disk images on Linux

Something that's not getting published but might be useful if you have to work with .ima floppy backup images created using WinImage, rather than Linux-standard .img files that you can just mount as a device.

Do all of this as superuser.

List your loop devices: losetup

If there's anything in this list, pick a loop device number that doesn't appear. I used 10.

If you don't already have a dedicated mount point for floppy drives: mkdir /mnt/floppy

losetup /dev/loop10 disk.ima mount -t vfat /dev/loop10 /mnt/floppy

I threw each disk of the sequence into a different loop device, and then sequentially mounted them on /mnt/floppy to swap disks in DOSBox.

You can also copy the mounted loop device to a more Linux-friendly img file, thus: dd bs=512 if=/dev/loop10 of=image.img

Thanks to this person from 2008 who published the solution to their own question, thus saving me a lot of trial and error: https://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?185346-How-to-deal-with-WinImage-ima-files-in-linux

Why yes, I am still making replacement floppy disks to replace dead ones in sets of installation media.

Back up your magnetic media while you still can.

#SoftwarePreservation #DataRecovery #FloppyDisks #Linux