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| Developer(s) | The GNU Project |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 4.0.21 / November 24, 2018 |
| Repository |  |
| Operating system | Unix-like |
| License | GNU GPL |
| Website | www |
Mtools is an open source collection of tools to allow a Unix operating system to manipulate files on an MS-DOS file system, typically a floppy disk or floppy disk image.[ citation needed ]
The mtools are part of the GNU Project and are released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
The following refers to mtools usage in floppy images. (Useful for virtual machines such as QEMU or VirtualBox.)
Copying a file to floppy image:
$ mcopy -i Disk.img file_source ::file_target Copying a file from floppy image to the current directory:
$ mcopy -i Disk.img ::file_source file_target Deleting all files in the disk image
$ mdel -i Disk.img ::*.* The drive character : (colon) has a special meaning. It is used to access image files which are directly specified on the command line using the -i options. [1]
File Allocation Table (FAT) is a computer file system architecture and a family of industry-standard file systems utilizing it. The FAT file system is a continuing standard which borrows source code from the original, legacy file system and proves to be simple and robust. It offers useful performance even in lightweight implementations, but cannot deliver the same performance, reliability and scalability as some modern file systems. It is, however, supported for compatibility reasons by nearly all currently developed operating systems for personal computers and many mobile devices and embedded systems, and thus is a well-suited format for data exchange between computers and devices of almost any type and age from 1981 up to the present.
A disk image, in computing, is a computer file containing the contents and structure of a disk volume or of an entire data storage device, such as a hard disk drive, tape drive, floppy disk, optical disc, or USB flash drive. A disk image is usually made by creating a sector-by-sector copy of the source medium, thereby perfectly replicating the structure and contents of a storage device independent of the file system. Depending on the disk image format, a disk image may span one or more computer files.
FreeDOS is a free operating system for IBM PC compatible computers. It intends to provide a complete DOS-compatible environment for running legacy software and supporting embedded systems.
GNU GRUB is a boot loader package from the GNU Project. GRUB is the reference implementation of the Free Software Foundation's Multiboot Specification, which provides a user the choice to boot one of multiple operating systems installed on a computer or select a specific kernel configuration available on a particular operating system's partitions.
Disk formatting is the process of preparing a data storage device such as a hard disk drive, solid-state drive, floppy disk or USB flash drive for initial use. In some cases, the formatting operation may also create one or more new file systems. The first part of the formatting process that performs basic medium preparation is often referred to as "low-level formatting". Partitioning is the common term for the second part of the process, making the data storage device visible to an operating system. The third part of the process, usually termed "high-level formatting" most often refers to the process of generating a new file system. In some operating systems all or parts of these three processes can be combined or repeated at different levels and the term "format" is understood to mean an operation in which a new disk medium is fully prepared to store files.
The SYSLINUX Project is a suite of lightweight master boot record (MBR) boot loaders for starting up IBM PC compatible computers with the Linux kernel. Primarily developed by H. Peter Anvin, the SYSLINUX bundle consists of several separate systems used for different purposes, including ISOLINUX, PXELINUX and EXTLINUX.
Damn Small Linux is a computer operating system for the x86 family of personal computers. It is free and open source software under the terms of the GNU GPL and other free and open source licenses. It was designed to run graphical applications on older PC hardware—for example, machines with 486/early Pentium processors and very little memory. DSL is a Live CD with a size of 50 MB. What originally started as an experiment to see how much software could fit in 50 MB eventually became a full-fledged Linux distribution. It can be installed on storage media with small capacities, like bootable business cards, USB flash drives, various memory cards, and Zip drives.
dd is a command-line utility for Unix and Unix-like operating systems, the primary purpose of which is to convert and copy files.
Ghost is a disk cloning and backup tool originally developed by Murray Haszard in 1995 for Binary Research. The technology was acquired in 1998 by Symantec.
DOSBox is an emulator program which emulates an IBM PC compatible computer running a DOS operating system. Many IBM PC compatible graphics and sound cards are also emulated. This means that original DOS programs are provided with an environment in which they can run correctly, even though the modern computers have dropped support for the old environment.
QEMU is a free and open-source emulator that performs hardware virtualization.
UltraISO is an application for Microsoft Windows for creating, modifying and converting ISO image files used for optical disc authoring, currently being produced by EZB Systems.
Distribution Media Format (DMF) is a format for floppy disks that Microsoft used to distribute software. It allowed the disk to contain 1680 kB of data on a 3½-inch disk, instead of the standard 1440 kB. As a side effect, utilities had to specially support the format in order to read and write the disks, which made copying of products distributed on this medium more difficult. An Apple Macintosh computer running Disk Copy 6.3.3 on the Mac OS 7.6 or later operating system can copy and make DMF disks. The first Microsoft software product that uses DMF for distribution were the "c" revisions of Office 4.x. It also was the first software product to use CAB files, then called "Diamond".
Amiga Disk File (ADF) is a file format used by Amiga computers and emulators to store images of disks. It has been around almost as long as the Amiga itself, although it was not initially called by any particular name. Before it was known as ADF, it was used in commercial game production, backup and disk virtualization. ADF is a track-by-track dump of the disk data as read by the Amiga operating system, and so the "format" is really fixed-width AmigaDOS data tracks appended one after another and held in a file. This file would, typically, be formatted, like the disk, in OFS.
IMG, in computing, refers to binary files with the .img filename extension that store raw disk images of floppy disks, hard drives, and optical discs or a vector image – .img.
In Unix-like operating systems, a loop device, vnd, or lofi is a pseudo-device that makes a file accessible as a block device.
Amiga software is computer software engineered to run on the Amiga personal computer. Amiga software covers many applications, including productivity, digital art, games, commercial, freeware and hobbyist products. The market was active in the late 1980s and early 1990s but then dwindled. Most Amiga products were originally created directly for the Amiga computer, and were not ported from other platforms.
HDCopy is a disk image application for floppy disks that runs in MS-DOS. It can copy a floppy on the fly, or by using archives with IMG file extension that store the content of the disk with a proprietary (compressed) file format.
MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and some operating systems attempting to be compatible with MS-DOS, are sometimes referred to as "DOS". MS-DOS was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s, from which point it was gradually superseded by operating systems offering a graphic user interface (GUI), in various generations of the graphical Microsoft Windows operating system.
Apple Disk Image is a disk image format commonly used by the macOS operating system. When opened, an Apple Disk Image is mounted as a volume within the Macintosh Finder.
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