Rawrite32 is a tool to prepare disks or other removeable media, especially USB memory sticks, from files called file system images. These images are usualy prepared with a NetBSD system already setup or downloaded from the official release (or NetBSD-daily snapshot server) and are utilized in various ways (depending on the port of NetBSD) to bootstrap a new installation.

You can download the file system images via the internet and move the contents onto appropriate media for your machine using this utility program.

The Rawrite32 sources support any kind of Win32 system (with some restrictions for ancient systems, Windows 95 upto Windows ME). The precompiled binary, however, only works on Windows 2000 or newer. Contact the author if you have a real need for a binary supporting win9x systems - if there is demand, I can make a differently compiled binary available.

You may use Rawrite32 for free, it is 2-clause BSD licensed, see the license for details.

August 5, 2024: New Version 1.0.12.0 released!

Updated xz (to 5.6.2) and zlib (to 1.3.1).

Old changes:

July 5, 2023: New Version 1.0.11.0 released!

Updated xz and bzlib2, source moved to github.

January 13, 2023: New Version 1.0.10.0 released!

Updated xz and zlib.

October 31, 2020: New Version 1.0.9.0 released!

Fixed english resources - now debug options are available consistently for all translations.

June 9, 2020: New Version 1.0.8.0 released!

Switched to VisualStudio 2017 and recompiled with up-to-date compiler, signed with new certificates and updated NSIS installer.

June 6, 2019: New Version 1.0.7.0 released!

Recompiled with up-to-date compiler, resigned with new certificates and updated NSIS installer.
No source changes.

July 4, 2018: New Version 1.0.6.0 released!

• New debug feature added (under the settings menu): query the system for all relevant devices and copy information to the clipboard, so the data can be easily mailed in bug reports.
• Adapted zlib project file for newer zlib versions, disabled assembler code (it will be removed in future zlib versions anyway).
• New certificate.

June 2, 2017: New Version 1.0.5.0 released!

Recompiled with up-to-date compiler and resigned with new certificates.
No source changes.

May 23, 2016: New Version 1.0.4.0 released!

Support for .xz files added, contributed by Josh Wu <rainyfeeling at outlook.com>.
All binaries are now signed.

February 5, 2016: New Version 1.0.3.0 released!

After quite some time: a small bug fix release: The program would crash previously when all hash types had been deselected. Also internally switched to using Visual Studio 2015. While there, the default selection of hashes to display has been slightly modernized, and the (nowadays useless) MD5 hash on the (decompressed) output has been replaced by the first selected input hash.

November 27, 2011: New Version 1.0.2.3 released.s

A display problem with non-ASCII messages and writing of uncompressed images has been fixed (thanks to NONAKA Kimihiro).

October 28, 2011: New Version 1.0.2.2 released.

The previous version actually broke writing to floppy drives (yes, they still do exist!). Thanks to Stephen Borrill for noticing and help with debugging.
Also writing of images wich contain filesystems known to windows (fat, ntfs) has been improved - they will only be recognized by the shell after rawrite32 is done writing.

September 25, 2011: New Version 1.0.2.1 released.

A few bugs with sticks showing up as REMOVABLE_DRIVE have been fixed. Furthermore the program has been translated into chinese (thanks to Charles Zhang).

August 19, 2010: New Version 1.0.2.0 released.

After a long time, Rawrite32 has been adapted to newer windows versions pand their restrictions on administrative use.
More hash calculations have been added and bzip2 compressed images are supported now.
Main focus has switched from targetting floppy drives (do you remember those?) to USB devices/memory sticks.
The program has been translated into german and japanese (thanks to Izumi Tsutsui, also for a lot of beta-testing!), into french (thanks to Quentin Garnier).

November 18, 2003: New Version 1.0.1.3 out
Thanks to Richard Dorsch a bug in decompressing files with compression rates > 1:10 has been fixed.

Version 1.0.1.2 fixed a bug in handling odd sized images, like the latest memtest86 ones that do not contain multiples of the floppy sector size.