Method for providing emulated flexible magnetic storage medium using network storage services

摘要

One embodiment of the present invention sets forth a technique for emulating a floppy disk drive using network storage services. An application executing on a diskless computing device generates INT 13 access requests to gain access to a floppy disk image residing on a storage server. The INT 13 access requests are directed to a translation function that maps cylinder head sector (CHS) addresses and commands native to floppy disk media to linear block addresses (LBA) and commands used to access data within SCSI devices. An iSCSI initiator residing within the diskless computing device directs the LBA requests to an iSCSI target residing within the storage server to access a LUN residing on the storage server that contains a floppy disk image. The application is then able to conduct access requests to the floppy disk image as though a physical floppy disk drive were present on the diskless computing device.