How to create SATA floppy disks with VirtualBox

Because it take me some time to accomplish this task sucefully I’ll share this how-to. It explain how to create a floppy disk (diskette) with SATA controllers in this case for an ASUS motherboard. It comes with a windows executable makedisk.exe wich copy the drivers into a floppy, the need of using virtualbox is that wine fails running this application and VirtualBox with windows XP does it. There is also a problem in my case with VirtualBox, it fails to mount a phisycal floppy so I had to use a image file, this how to explains the steps to acomplish the task:

// Steps 1 to for taken from Crear Floppy Virtual en Linux « La Página de Horus

  1. dd if=/dev/zero of=floppy.img bs=1k count=1440, with this I create a empty floppy disk image 1,44 MB in my home.
  2. Then with losetup /dev/loop0 floppy.img , mount the image in loop mode
  3. Now format it: sudo mkfs -t vfat /dev/loop0
  4. Umount the image loop: sudo losetup -d /dev/loop0
  5. In VirtualBox, Config, floppy disk select the floppy.img file created previously
  6. On windows xp inside virtualbox run the utility makedisk.exe and writhe the files onto the floppy disk image file.
  7. Now copy the files from a: to a folder in your home, for example create a rar with the files in a:, then copy it to a samba shared folder or send the rar by email.
  8. Insert a disk in the floppy drive, format and mount it:
    mkfs -t vfat /dev/fd0
    mkdir /mnt/floppy
    mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
  9. Put the .rar in some folder and xtract the files in the mounted floppy:
    unrar e /home/…/floppy1.rar /mnt/floppy

Now you have the floppy with the sata drivers.