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I have a CD with a bunch of files on it that I have thrown onto a floppy image (.img) and am trying to access these files within a virtual windows 3.1 machine. I used powerISO to create the floppy image. When I cd into the floppy drive, the floppy is there but only 8 out of about 40 files actually show up using DIR. What could cause this problem?

Hidden Files?!

Lack of disk space? A data CD has a capacity of around 640MB. That is why they came into existence, because a late model 3.5inch floppy only had a capacity of 1.44MB.

Though I note you haven't said what variety of floppy image you told PowerISO to create.

I told power ISO to build a floppy disk image (.img) of size 1.2 MB, and the files I'm trying to put on them only add up to about 540 KB. Also, ive tried both using a FAT 12 and FAT 16 file system. Same problem in both cases.

I reopen the .img file in powerISO, and all the files are there... I think it's a problem with the VM

I've never used PowerISO but use WinImage instead.
Create a 1.44Mb Floppy with just FAT

Steveio66 wrote:I told power ISO to build a floppy disk image (.img) of size 1.2 MB, and the files I'm trying to put on them only add up to about 540 KB. Also, ive tried both using a FAT 12 and FAT 16 file system. Same problem in both cases.

VirtualBox requires that floppy images be the exactly the size of the disk they are supposed to be an image of. If that isn't the case then it isn't an image. Oh, and 1.44MB would be the standard size (exactly 1,474,560 bytes). Nobody has made a 1.2MB floppy drive for about 25 years. Floppies should always be FAT12, though VirtualBox doesn't care about the floppy contents hence it won't care what filesystem you use.

VirtualBox users regularly use floppy images to transfer small files and to install old legacy operating systems DOS, Win3, Win95 etc. Stop suggesting it's a problem with VirtualBox: it isn't.