Writing to a floppy disk via SoftPaq

[greeninhabitant]

Hello, I am working on a Compaq Deskpro 486/33M which has no BIOS and requires creating a floppy-based configuration utility - links to the exe files for burning the utility are found here. I have an external floppy drive module, and a few 3.5" 1.44MB floppies. The floppy I am using is formatted to FAT via Windows 11.

Unfortunately none of the exe files will run on Windows 11 (even in compatibility mode). In DOSBox and DOSBox-X however, the executable starts just fine and I can navigate the prompts.

I put the executable I want to use (SP1999.exe) into C:\TOOLS; the floppy is mounted in Windows 11 to A:\. When I boot up DOSBox(-X), I do the following:

mount c C:\TOOLS
mount a A:\ -t floppy
c:
SP1999.exe

The executable starts, and I follow through the prompts. When I am asked to enter appropriate drive to make a new diskette (A or B), I enter A since that is where I have mounted my floppy.

Unfortunately, on DOSBox-X I get the error Disk Failure, make sure disk is installed. On DOSBox, I get ERROR 07: Media is not supported.

I'm wondering if any DOSBox wizards have a fix for this - assuming it is in fact an issue with the emulator and the software is not busted/I'm not using it wrong. I know I am able to write to the floppy in DOSBox, as copy NUL empty.txt works as expected. I have tried running DOSBox as administrator, but that had no effect.

[rderooy]

That is unlikely to work, when you mount the host floppy drive that way, it is really a folder mount and you cannot do low-level actions to it which undoubtedly the Compaq utility is trying to do.

Instead, create a 1.44MB floppy image file with imgmake, mount that image on the B: drive, and then use the compaq utility to write to the B: drive.

mount c C:\TOOLS
IMGMAKE disk.ima -t fd_1440
imgmount b disk.ima
SP1999.exe
exit

You now have a regular raw floppy image, that you need to write to the real floppy drive from the host OS. I'm not sure what the best way to do that is from a Windows host. Under Linux, I would just write it with dd, but that is not an option on Windows.

[greeninhabitant]

Thanks for quick reply!

For some reason the software doesn't accept B as an answer to the enter appropriate drive prompt (always uses A: drive) - but it does seemingly successfully write to the disk.ima file per your instructions if I just imgmount a disk.ima instead.

SoftPaq requires 4 different floppy drives to be used during the process - after the first burn succeeds, it then prompts to insert disk 2, etc. Is there any way to swap the image files mapped to A: in the middle of the process? I figure what will be left over in disk.ima is solely the 4th disk's contents.

[rderooy]

yes, create 4 disk images

IMGMAKE disk1.ima -t fd_1440
IMGMAKE disk2.ima -t fd_1440
IMGMAKE disk3.ima -t fd_1440
IMGMAKE disk4.ima -t fd_1440

then you can either;

imgmount a disk1.ima disk2.ima disk3.ima disk4.ima

And use the disk swap hotkey or corresponding menu item to swap between them.
Or you can just load another disk image from the menus