Converting FCD to ISO using the original software

bgstack15 — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 14:23:24 GMT

On my main file server, I store an old number of files in a format last used on the pre-NT kernel Windows platform. Nowadays for compact disc images I would use the iso format. But this nifty piece of software from the past, IMSI CD Copier Pro, used its own format, .FCD. It worked great at the time!

$ ls -al *FCD
-rw-rw-r--. 1 bgstack15 bgstack15 209218511 May 19  2001 Math Blaster 3.FCD
-rw-rw-r--. 1 bgstack15 bgstack15 402961457 May 26  2001 Math Blaster 4.FCD
-rw-rw-r--. 1 bgstack15 bgstack15 258842982 May 22  2001 Math Blaster 5.FCD
-rw-rw-r--. 1 bgstack15 bgstack15  55161301 May  4  2002 Math Blaster 6.FCD

With my recent Windows 98 SE virtual machine, I can now load up the CD image files and get the sweet, sweet files for these educational computer games.

I was unable to get any nfs or SMB mounts to work in my vm, so I ended up just using some virtualized CD drives, and building new iso files that contain the FCD files which the VM will then read and re-mount in yet another virtualized CD drive. This sounds like a meme...

My first step was to install CD Copier Pro. I have the installer image as an ISO, and my original license key. I failed to take screenshots for this step, but here it is running on the vm.

Now, to get the .FCD files into the VM with smb or nfs, I just make a new iso file and mount it in the VM. I made the iso file:

time mkisofs -J -rock -V 'MB3fcd' -o /mnt/public/Support/SetupsBig/Windows/mb5-fcd.iso Math\ Blaster\ 3.FCD

And then configure the VM to use that file. That whole path was where I had already configured libvirt to use as a storage pool.

So on the hot-updated CD drive in the vm, you can now see the FCD file. I just draged it into the main area of CD Copier Pro, and now it is available as an option. I then dragged it from this main area, to the H: drive in the left-side area of the window. And now H:\ is available in Windows Explorer.

I set up a directory on C:\ to hold the CD contents. I then copied the contents for each FCD I was interested in.

Once I got all the FCD files' contents to C:, I was ready to mount up the guest OS (I shut it down first). On the kvm host, I ran this command.

$ guestmount -a /var/lib/libvirt/images/win98-01a.qcow2 -m /dev/sda1 /mnt/foo
$ ls -al /mnt/foo/CDROMs
total 80
drwxr-xr-x.  5 root root 16384 Feb  7 10:29 .
drwxr-xr-x.  6 root root 16384 Dec 31  1969 ..
drwxr-xr-x. 11 root root 16384 Feb  7 10:29 MB3rdGr
drwxr-xr-x. 13 root root 16384 Feb  7 10:49 MB4thGr
drwxr-xr-x. 12 root root 16384 Feb  7 11:14 MB5thGr

And now I make a new iso file, from these recently extracted contents.

cd /mnt/foo/CDROMs
time mkisofs -J -rock -V 'MB3rdGr' -o /mnt/public/CDROMs/Games/Math\ Blaster/MB3rdGr.iso MB3rdGr

And now I can go try to run Math Blaster 5 in Wine!

References

Weblinks

https://www.xmodulo.com/mount-qcow2-disk-image-linux.html

Knowledge Base (Posts about copier)

Converting FCD to ISO using the original software

References

Weblinks