Disk Image Creator
Author: Copyright (C) 2014 by CiderPress authors

Create Disk Image

This allows you to create blank, formatted disk images in a variety of formats. The images created can be used with CiderPress or an Apple II emulator.

Start by selecting the filesystem. CiderPress currently supports creation of images in DOS 3.2, DOS 3.3, ProDOS, and UCSD Pascal formats. You can also choose to create a completely blank file with the specified size, though this is only useful in a few circumstances.

The choice of filesystem determines which size options are available to you. DOS 3.2/3.3 formatting is only allowed on 140K floppies, Pascal can be written to 140K or 800K floppies, and ProDOS can be written to images from 16 blocks up to 32MB. Blank images can be as small as 1 block or as large as 8GB. Your filesystem selection also enables some filesystem-specific options:

DOS 3.2/3.3: choose the disk volume number (default 254) and whether or not a DOS image should be written. If "Allocate DOS tracks" is checked, tracks 1 and 2 are marked "in use", and a bootable DOS image is written to the disk. If it's not checked, tracks 1 and 2 are marked as free space, and the disk will not be bootable.

ProDOS: choose the volume name. ProDOS volume names must start with a letter, contain only letters, numbers, and '.', and can be at most 15 characters long. To make the disk bootable, you will need to copy the "PRODOS" file from another ProDOS 8 disk.

Pascal: choose the volume name. Pascal volume names can only be 7 characters long, but may contain letters, numbers, and symbols other than "$=?,[#:". To make the disk bootable, you will need "SYSTEM.APPLE" and "SYSTEM.PASCAL" from a Pascal system disk.

After you hit "OK", you will be prompted for the name of the file to save to. For 140K floppy images you can select DOS order (".do", the default) or ProDOS order (".po"). For DOS 3.2, ".d13" must be used. For other images only ProDOS ordering is available. If you want the image to be in a different format, such as .SDK or .2MG, use the Disk Image Converter tool.

If you want to create a blank filesystem image on physical media (e.g. format a 1.4MB floppy disk for ProDOS), create an image of the appropriate size, open the floppy disk with the Volume Copier, then copy the image onto the disk with the "load from file" button.

Tip: if you want to create several images of the same kind, create one and then use Windows Explorer commands to make multiple copies of the file.