Dealing with CopyQM file format

CopyQM

CopyQM

So I had a few disk images in the CopyQM format, and trying to get an emulator to output them back to a disk image is well.. really trying.  Then as luck would have it, I stumbled onto the program read_cqm.c and it does exactly what it says it’ll do which is read the CopyQM disk images, and then output them into a raw format.

9 thoughts on “Dealing with CopyQM file format

  1. Giving this one a shot — hope I can get a set of CP/M-86 bootdisks into a format Winimage will find more palatable.

      • Compiled fine using Bloodshed Dev-C with GCC! looks like this one outputs .dd images. Now, I need to get that into the .img Winimage likes, and not Sydex’s own .img format.

        • the .dd looked like a ‘raw’ image to me, I was able to boot up on PCEm without any issues… I don’t know why winimage wouldn’t like them, it liked mine…

        • for CP/M disks, I liked CPMTOOLS, although you’ll need to know what kind of format the disks were/are… I guess they are CP/M for the PC, so you can work with that. Or try an emulator and see if it boots.

    • WinImage doesn’t like CP/M format at all (isn’t FAT or anything like that). To extract files from those disks you will need use other tool that can work the CP/M format.

    • As already said in comp.os.cpm, the readily build cpmtools for Windows does _not_ include LibDsk at all.
      So as a workaround, all other programs (see my blog also for my hints about using cpmtools with VMWare Player and Virtualbox) which may help to convert image files should be considered also.

  2. Now this exactly the information I needed. Some 20+ years ago (probably closer to 25+) I had archived a lot of my old DOS (and maybe MSWin 3.x) installer disks using CopyQM. Was looking to save space, but never considered the possibility I’d be extracting them within an entirely different environment. If it were long enough ago Linux may not even have existed yet.

    And here I was thinking I’d need to set up a FreeDOS VM and extract them to virtual floppies one at a time (especially difficult if dealing with 360K or 720K floppy images). Either that or try to get CopyQM to work in DOSBOX/DOSemu.

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