To create single sided disks on a PC (Windows XP) we will need a floppy drive that is connected to the FDD controller. The tests that I have done with USB floppy drive failed. It simply did not want to recognise single sided (360K) formatted floppy disks.
I still had an old computer with a copy of Windows XP on it. And actually I am writing this blog on this computer inside Chrome browser, so I guess it is still usable.
We are going to need a tool called Disk-Manager. This can be found on www.lexlechz.at website. Or by clicking here to directly download this application. We are also going to need OmniDiskImg tool. Download it on www.shlock.co.uk. I have used the FreeDOS bootable floppy version.
For our test we are going to create a single sided disk on our MSX2 computer and write a simple "Hello World" in basic, just so we can test if the disk was copied successfully.
On your MSX2 insert an empty floppy disk, that will be our source disk and designated to be formatted single sided (360K).
In basic write:
call format
and follow instructions to format the disk single sided.
After you are done, just write a simple "Hello World" program. Like:
10 CLS 20 PRINT "Hello World"
and save it to the freshly formatted single sided floppy disk with:
SAVE "A:HELLO.BAS"
Now eject the disk and insert it into your PC. Start the OmniDiskImg application, that you downloaded before. Select Logical drive "A" and see that it will recognise it as single sided disk (360 kB). That is good.
Now Read the disk image by clikcing on the Read button in the Drive group and save it as single.img or something similar.
Now we have our source disk in image format and we can write it to another disk. For that purpose we are going to use our Disk-Manager tool.
In File, select "Open..." and select our single.img image. You will need to change the filter (files of type) to All files.
This is what you will get as result:
To write this image to disk, insert a new floppy to the drive and in File menu select the "Write to disk...". Mark the "format" box and press "OK".
We have now successfully created a copy of our single sided floppy disk.
If you insert that disk into your MSX2 floppy drive you can load our test program that we have created earlier with:
LOAD "A:HELLO.BAS"