Does anyone know a way to simulate a 5.25" floppy drive on your hard drive. I have downloaded a .dim file that must be restored to a 5.25" drive. WinImage will not open this disk image file, so I can't convert it to 1.44 3.5". And I really don't want to buy an actual 5.25" drive and try to find disks for it. Any suggestions? Thanks.

I don't think you are gonna find anything like that. I cannot imagine any use for it.

You don't need to imagine a use for it, I stated one in my original message. Thanks loads for the encouragement. :)

I find your delema interesting. I did a little surfing and found this. I don't know if it will do what you want tho. www.diskfactory.com/features.asp www.thebattles.net/wang/emu/html/disk_factory.html

I can try to convert your .dim file to a 1.44 floppy format using the Bochs X86 emulator. You could do that by yourself, but the process is so complex to explain that I prefer to do it by myself. So, if you want, you should send me the dim file and I will send back the image of the 1.44 floppy converted. I need also to get some explanation about the .dim format. If you want to try...Satisfaction NOT garantited!

Carl and Ivo, thank you for your responses. Carl I looked into your suggestions, and I can't see how I can use disk factory to solve my problem. Thanks for trying to help. Ivo, I looked into your suggestion too, and I believe I could accomplish what I want with Bochs, and I will be playing around with this old pc emulator, thanks for turning me onto this! :) But what I wound up doing was this, and I don't know if it would work on anyone else's computer, although I doubt that it would only work on mine. You see what I wanted to do was extract this .dim file onto a 5.25" 360K disk, and then use WinImage to create a 1.44 MB image of THAT disk. I went into the BIOS and changed my a: drive to a 5.25" 360K drive, saved changes, and exit the BIOS. On reboot I get the error "Floppy Disk(s) fail (40). However... Hit F1 to continue and Windows then shows my 3.5" drive as a 5.25" drive. I then inserted a 3.5" diskette with the hole without a shutter taped over, and successfully formatted that disk as a 5.25" 360K diskette! I ran the image extractor, and restored the image to my fake 5.25" with no problems whatsoever. Anyways, thanks and happy computing! :)

I was going to suggest the same thing. Back when 5.25 floppies were the defacto standard we often faked the density. Used to have to punch an extra notch in the floppy to let lower density work as higher. Usually worked too. I still have a working 5.25 drive. Have some old software programs that allowed formatting to non standard capacities. Microsoft used to ship some of their software with the first disk or two in non standard capacity. In order to make a useable backup, you needed the non std. capacity.