This will work in all modern versions of Apple Mac OSX including 10.9 Mavericks, 10.8, 10.7 and 10.6. In this tutorial we look at formatting disks via the GUI app called Disk Utility and its equivalent command line tool diskutil. That will be a topic for another day.All external USB disks can be formatted to work on Mac OSX, but not always straight out of the box. With the floppy image out of the way, I can move on to crafting an autounattend.xml that enables a newly created Windows VM to be controlled by Ansible.

Either of which can be used to eject the disk: hdiutil eject /Volumes/FLOPPYROOT The output will include the device path and the mount path. flp on MacOS, you can also do that with hdiutil: hdiutil attach floppy.flp ov: Overwrite the output file if it already existsĪnd finally, rename the file to. This option is only required if -srcfolder is specified. format UDRW: This format option creates an uncompressed image file. srcfolder : This can be omitted if you just want an empty floppy layout NONE : uses the whole disk instead of partitioning it. Next, use the hdiutil command to create the floppy image from that folder hdiutil create -size 1440k -fs 'MS-DOS FAT12' -layout NONE -srcfolder floppyroot -format UDRW -ov floppy.dmgĪ few of those hdiutil options could use some context: Here’s how you can use the MacOS terminal command line to create floppy disk images from scratch.įirst, create a folder containing the contents of the floppy disk you are about to create. As it turns out, hdiutil can create them, it’s just not very well documented. What I needed was a scriptable method to create virtual floppy images and inject files without using a helper VM to do it. That method was much too interactive as I tested and iterated on my autounattend.xml file.

After all, thats what VMware says to do in kb1002195. flp extension, attach it to a VM, and then format it from inside the VM. flp images is to make an empty file with a. The best of the bad ideas on the whiteboard was to use a virtual floppy disk. Recently, I needed to inject an autounattend.xml file into a windows VM so I could bring up a Windows instance from scratch with Ansible. The floppy disk may be obsolete in the real world, but sometimes you still need to add one to a virtual machine.

Format floppy disk mac