Virtual floppy not implemented :(

[rcardona2k]

I've been trying in vain to install WinXP SP2 using a pre-allocated LSI Logic disk and lo and behold, the virtual floppy disk I need for the oem driver can't be connected.

After adding these lines to my vmx config,

floppy0.present = "TRUE"

floppy0.startConnected = "TRUE"

floppy0.fileName = "floppy.flp"[/pre]

Here's the relevant output in vmware.log:

rcardona2k$ grep -i floppy vmware.log

Oct 22 22:18:32.947: vmx| DICT floppy0.present = TRUE

Oct 22 22:18:32.947: vmx| DICT floppy0.startConnected = TRUE

Oct 22 22:18:32.947: vmx| DICT floppy0.fileName = floppy.flp

Oct 22 22:18:35.009: vmx| XXXMACOS: implement FloppyHost_Connect

Oct 22 22:18:35.009: vmx| \[msg.floppy.badConnectLong] Could not connect to floppy "floppy.flp".

Please correct your configuration and then re-attempt to connect the virtual floppy drive.

Oct 22 22:18:35.009: vmx| \[msg.device.startdisconnected] Virtual device floppy0 will start disconnected.

Oct 22 22:18:42.768: vmx| FLOPPY-MAIN : drive 0 has a file name, but no ops.[/pre]

Note the line:

XXXMACOS: implement FloppyHost_Connect[/b]

I would read this as relating to connecting the host drive /dev/fd not to connecting an FLP file but I tried the full path to my FLP in case relative paths were not working and I get the same error. Bummer.

(Side notes:

1. Having no beefy Windows PC with 10 GB free in the house, so I used Parallels to solve my chicken-egg problem and create a pre-allocated VMDK by smb sharing my Mac's HD and using vmware-vdiskmanager.exe. That worked surprisingly well.

2. Can't LSI offer their drivers in a virtual .flp instead of a ZIP file?? I spent an hour trying to create a virtual floppy with Apple utilities only to end up using Parallels, again for this task.)

3. If VMware can change an adapter type from LSILogic to BusLogic, why for a pre-allocated disk can't it change it to IDE? I edited the VMDK manifest myself to get around this 'limitation'

[HPReg]

Last time I tried floppy images with Fusion, they worked. You might want to add this in your .vmx config file, otherwise the code will try to open a host device, not an image file on the host:

floppy0.fileType = "file"

About your side-notes #3: Once a disk is created, you cannot change its type (IDE vs SCSI). If I remember correctly, it has to do with the disk geometry being encoded differently. I'm not sure anymore.

[rcardona2k]

Thanks, that was the issue.

[admin]

You're already past this step, but for what it's worth... When I needed to get the LSI drivers into a virtual floppy image, I made one under Linux, kinda like this:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/brice/myfloppy.flp bs=1k count=1440

mkfs.vfat /home/brice/myfloppy.flp

mount -o loop /home/brice/myfloppy.flp /mnt/floppy

cp \{whatever} /mnt/floppy

umount /mnt/floppy

Mac OS seems to lack both a way to write a FAT filesystem into a file and a way to do loopback mounts of arbitrary files, or perhaps that is just my own ignorance. But doing it under Linux seemed pretty easy.

[rcardona2k]

The commands are little different in OS X. You can use newfs_msdos to format the file and diskutil mount to mount it. Alternatively once you have a blank 1.44 MB file you can use Apple Disk Utility to format it. The trick is it must end in .img.

The VMware standard is .flp but Mac utilities perfer .img to deal with virtual floppies.

[rcardona2k]

Disregard my post above, this is how to create a formatted floppy, named floppy.dmg in one shot:

hdiutil create -volname virtual -size 1440k -fs MS-DOS floppy[/code]

The file will have a .dmg extension, so just rename to floppy.img to make the floppy mountable in the Finder by double-clicking on it. To be able to select it in the Fusion file browser, you'll need to change the extension to .flp.

I prefer to keep my virtual floppies with a .img extension and edit the VMX config accordingly.