Project "WinDIMG32"
WinDIMG32 - a Free Software 32bit Windows Disk IMaGer.
Table of Contents
- General Information about WinDIMG
- Documentation
- Additional Information
- Releases
- Current Limitations
- About WinDIMG and the Author
General Information
The goal of this project is to provide a simple Free Software disk imaging utility for older 32bit Windows systems. It is a companion to the DIMG project which provides a portable disk imaging utility for modern operating systems.
At this time a prototype release (v0.1) is available which includes nothing more than a simple utility for reading and writing raw disk images. As a prototype (and my first ever win32 program) it likely has bugs. Below you can see it running under Windows NT 3.51 (not windows 3.1) and Windows NT 4.0.
Documentation
A1SI-HL01 - Windows help file, included with release.
Releases
For all available releases, see http://ftp.zx.net.nz/pub/DGS/windimg32/readme.html. The current version is 0.1 which was released on the 7th of June 2010 and includes a simple imaging utility (SIMG). Binaries for x86 (IBM PC Compatible) and DEC Alpha systems as well as source code are available. If you don't know which one you want, its probably x86. A manifest file is also available for use on Windows XP/vista/7 systems. Place this in the same directory as simg32.exe to use the new xp/vista/7 widget styles.
- Minimal testing - its the first version of my first win32 program
- Has only been tested with Windows NT 3.51 and up. Compatibility with NT 3.1 and 3.50 is unknown (it might work though)
- Windows 95/98/ME are entirely unsupported as drive access is somewhat more nasty there. Support will be added eventually.
- The program tends to lock up a little while imaging. You may have to click cancel a few times to make it stop. This too will be fixed soon.
- There is currently no ability to retry in the event of a read or write failure (this will probably appear in v1.2)
- Geometry handling under windows is very basic (that is, non-existant). It relies on windows to detect the geometry of the disk and it will not try to set the geometry when writing to it. This means that you can't write a 1.4MB disk image to a 720K disk or a 720K disk image to a 1.4MB disk - you have to reformat the target disk to match the disk image.
- The program has not yet been tested on anything other than 1.4MB disks. It is entirely unknown if they will work at all.
- OpenWatcom is used for the Alpha builds. OpenWatcom has never officially supported the Alpha - support for the platform is of pre-release quality and is now not well maintained.
About WinDIMG32 and the Author
All work on WinDIMG32 so far has been done by David Goodwin. Initial work began early 2010 and has progressed slowly since then in my spare time. This is my first Win32 program (ever) so the code quality is not wonderful and there are probably bugs.