Cannot load a Floppy Disk image with Bochs emulator

Question

I have a floppy disk image which I am trying to load with Bochs Emulator.

It is from a CTF challenge and can be downloaded from here: http://squarectf.com/2017/floppy.img

I am using Bochs version 2.3.9 on Windows 7 x64

I started Bochs.exe and configured the memory and disk settings as shown below:

Memory options:

Disk and Boot options:

However, when I start the emulator, it gives the following error:

I have seen a writeup online for this CTF that describes the same method for loading the disk image and it worked.

Please let me know why it does not work for me.

Note: I am able to load the disk image using qemu-system-x86_64 or qemu-system-i386 on Linux already. However, I want to understand why I cannot load it with Bochs.

I even tried the method of creating a bochsrc file and loading it using bochsdbg.exe as shown below:

bochsdbg.exe -f bochsrc -q

However, I still get an error while loading it.

Update: I am able to load the image in Bochs emulator by selecting floppy as the boot device under Boot options.

However, I cannot load the image using bochsdbg.exe. Below is my bochsrc.txt file:

romimage: file=$BXSHARE/BIOS-bochs-latest
vgaromimage: file=$BXSHARE/VGABIOS-lgpl-latest
megs: 16
ata0: enabled=1, ioaddr1=0x1f0, ioaddr2=0x3f0, irq=14
ata0-master: type=disk, path="floppy.img", mode=flat, cylinders=2, heads=16, spt=63
boot: floppy

And I get the following error message:

Bochs is exiting with the following message:
[      ] bochsrc.txt:5: ataX-master/slave: unknown type 'floppy'

The reason I want to have a proper bochsrc file is because I want to use IDA Pro to debug the boot sector.

Answer 1

I fought a similar error for a while and figured I was naming the disk image as disk.img. When I renamed it to something else, it worked. In your example, you're naming it to floppy.img, so you could try something else.

It's a bit of a guess, but seems like bochs doesn't like files with reserved words, like disk or floppy.