MKDISKIMAGE(1)

💾 MKDISKIMAGE(1) 💾

okay bestie, buckle up — this is mkdiskimage from the Syslinux Project, and it's literally the girlboss of blank disk images. No cap. 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

mkdiskimage — creates a blank, MS-DOS formatted hard disk image. That's the whole job. She does one thing and she ate. 💅

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

mkdiskimage [-doFMz4] [-i id] file cyl head sect

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So here's the vibe: this is a convenient lil tool that generates a hard disk image for you, already pre-formatted according to the MS-DOS specification, and it's got all the properties you asked for. Iconic, honestly.

A disk image named file gets created, and it'll be big enough to hold cyl cylinders, head heads, and sect sectors. But wait — if you use -M, then cyl doesn't mean cylinders anymore, it gets interpreted as size in MBytes instead. The way that one letter flips the whole meaning?? 😭

Other stuff you can do: ZIP type disks, FAT32 formatting, and adding an emulation header. Little extras, big energy. ✨

👑 OPTIONS 👑

• -4 — uses the fourth partition table entry. This is the standard for ZIP-disks, so if you're doing ZIP-disk things, this is your girl. 🎀
• -F — formats the partition using a FAT32 file system. FAT32 era, we love to see it.
• -M — the argument cyl is given in Megabytes. She recalculates it to get the count in cylinders. Math? On my watch? Apparently yes. 🧚
• -d — adds a DOSEMU header. Cute lil header, just for you.
• -i id — specifies the MBR identity field as id. Give her a name, she'll wear it. 👑
• -o — prints to stdout the file system offset. Very "here's where it actually starts, bestie". 📍
• -z — uses a ZIP-disk geometry. Heads up though: this one needs heads=64 and sect=32. It's not a suggestion, it's a requirement, fr fr. ⚠️

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

• syslinux(1)

🌈 HOMEPAGE 🌈

Want more tea about the Syslinux project? All the info lives on the homepage at <http://www.syslinux.org/>. Go look, iykyk. 🦋

💜 AUTHOR 💜

mkdiskimage was written by H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>.

This manual page was written by Mats Erik Andersson <debian@gisladisker.se>.

shoutout to the authors for real, they carried this whole page on their backs 💖

and that's the whole page, bestie!! version 5.00, dated 2014-06-14 — a true classic that still serves. mwah 💅✨