Disk IMage Archiver
Disk Image Archiver (stylized as Disk IMage Archiver), or DIM, is a shareware disk imaging utility for PC DOS developed by Ray (Arsen) Arachelian. Disk images can be created as regular data files. Optionally, a password can be specified to protect the disk image contents, although the encryption method is said to not to be very secure. A companion tool, MKSFXDIM, can convert these files into self-extracting executable modules; however, encrypted disk images are not supported. Versions of the software other than 1.4a seem to have disappeared and sample files are very hard to find.
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Identification
Disk image files start with the ASCII text Disk IMage VER 1.0 Copyright (C) 1992 Ray Arachelian, All Rights Reserved., but checking Disk IMage VER (hexadecimal 44 69 73 6b 20 49 4d 61 67 65 20 56 45 52 20) should be enough[1].
Executable self-extracting images start with an MS-DOS EXE header. Previously mentioned signature should be found somewhere from the start of the overlay segment (see MS-DOS_EXE#Special_file_positions for reference). A signature in the TrID database[2] matches the EXE header from SFX executables created by MKSFXDIM.EXE V1.3, which is included in the DIM 1.4a distribution package.
Software
- http://cd.textfiles.com/simtel20/MSDOS/DSKUTL/DIM14A.ZIP
- Aaru allegedly supports reading and writing Disk IMage Archiver files[3].
Sample files
IBM PC-DOS 1.10 disk image ripped and packaged by Tech Knight for the Endangered Sofware Archive
Self-extracting disk images (note that these disks don't have a FAT-based file system)
- https://ftp.sco.com/UW20/2069as.exe
- https://ftp.sco.com/UW20/2069st.exe
- https://ftp.sco.com/UW20/hba202.exe
- https://ftp.sco.com/UW20/hba203.exe
- dexvert samples — archive/diskIMageArchiverDiskImage
