Rubenerd

I’m restoring the first computer I built when I was in primary school, and have been trying to locate the exact OEM version of Windows 95 I licenced along with the parts from Make Fine Computer in Funan Centre. I call out the name of the shop as a nostalgic homage, as they’ve long since closed down. ♡

Winworld and the Internet Archive have been tremendous resources for finding these images, but one version I downloaded came extracted to an MDF. It’s an Alcohol 120% disk image that can’t be burned to a CD on my Mac or BSD boxes, so I wanted to convert it an ISO.

It’s easy enough with the surprisingly-named mdf2iso:

$ mdf2iso Win95_OSR25.mdf
    
==> mdf2iso v0.3.1 by Salvatore Santagati
==> Licensed under GPL v2 or later
==> Win95_OSR25.mdf is already ISO9660.

Sure enough, just appending the .iso extension worked.

Lesson learned: try mounting MDFs as if they’re ISOs first. If it isn’t, use Salvatore Santagati’s excellent utility. If only those awful bin and cue files were as easy.

It’s on FreeBSD ports, pkgsrc, and Homebrew.