IMG file is based on the file system of the disk from which the image was taken. These are not just used for floppy disk images, but also hard disk, optical disks and even bitmap (graphics) images.īecause it's a raw copy of each sector, the actual format of the data held within the. IMG extension are usually raw disk images which contain a sector by sector copy of the original media. Instead, I will summarize the most common types you will see and how best to use them.IMG filesįiles with a. This article will not go into technical detail on the constructs that make up a floppy disk image format. to be able to download a floppy from the web for use on a modern system running a DOS emulator or on an old system with a modern 'floppy drive emulator', such as a Gotek drive. These days we use floppy disk images mostly for two reasons:Ģ) For convenient propagation of a floppy disk's contents, e.g. Floppy disks, as you know, used to be the primary storage mechanism for data in the 80s, and these days both the drives and magnetic media can be problematic to get working reliably.

Images of floppy disks have existed since the DOS days, primarily through backup software, often with compression applied to reduce the size of the image file. This means that even the boot sector is contained in the image file, and hence if you restore the image back onto an original floppy disk it would boot just as the original did! It also contains empty sectors if those sectors were empty on the original media. They are called 'images' because typically the file contains a direct 'image' of each sector that existed on the original media. A disk image is simply a single file that contains an entire floppy disk's data.

How do i format a floppy to a raw disk