RawWrite Studio 0.1 written by John Newbigin

What is RawWrite Studio?

RawWrite studio is a collection of tools for reading and writing disk images from Windows.  It builds on the solid performance of RawWrite for windows but allows for flexibility in writing to USB devices and other disk types and sizes.  It allows for single .exe disk creation for easy distribution of floppy disk images.

rawwrite

This is the tradition RawWrite for windows.  It currently only supports 1.44 Meg floppy disks but will be extended to support other disk types and sizes.

dd - convert and copy a file

This is a command line tool similar to the UNIX/Linux version.  It provides a flexible way to read and write disks and files or part of a disk or file.

Other tools

Create a self writing disk image .exe file.  Similar in concept to the self extracting .zip file, just run the .exe, select a floppy drive and click write.  Will support compression so the .exe + image may be smaller than a traditional .img file.

License & Copyright

Most of the tools will be copyright by me John Newbigin <jn@it.swin.edu.au>.  They will be made available under the terms of the GPL.  Other licensing is available on request.  For more info just email me.

Download

This is an ongoing project and tools will be added as they are developed.

Stable Tools

• RawWrite
• dd

Tools in development

• rrtool version 0.4 beta 1 for Windows
• rrtool version 0.4 beta 1 for Linux (produces windows executables)

rrtool is a command line tool which can compress, decompress and checksum image files.  It can also create self writing disk image .exe files.

Example usage - Single disk image

Imagine you distribute a single 1.44 Meg floppy disk image, it could be a boot disk, firmware, drivers whatever.

If you do not have the image in a file, use RawWrite or dd to read the disk into a file

dd if=\\.\a: of=image1.img bs=1k count=1440

Now you want to create an .exe which can write this image to a disk, so you create a config file called mystuff.txt which looks like this:

This disk is used for xyz
image1.img,"x86 driver disk for xyz","This disk is required if you have the xyz hardware in your computer",TRUE

Then you run rrtool --build mystuff.txt and it will create mystuff.exe.  When run, this exe can write your image to a floppy disk under any version of windows or extract it to a file.

You can list multiple disk images in one exe.  You can flag which ones should be selected by default. This uses code I wrote to repack the resource section and the PE file. This is still a bit experemintal, so if your resulting .exe does not work, please let me know.

Last modified 20050410
Maintained by John Newbigin http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn