Hello .. I've downloaded Mac OS 8.0 [Italian] from the FTP, and I want to use with with the emulator BasiliskII or SheepShaver. The Mac OS 8.0 from the FTP is in .img format, and it's not bootable or readable from another Mac OS 8.0 system (in english, installed through a bootable .iso). How can I install that Mac OS 8.0 in italian and in .img format ?

Hm, so I assume it does not mount in SheepShavers mounter?
SheepShaver can mount raw data...hmmm...

I'll try installing this myself, and see how it works out...
if it fails, I will repack it in a SheepShaver-friendly and reupload it...

Maybe the .img file is a Disk Copy NDIF compressed image with its resource fork lost...

Disk Copy says that the Disk Image cannot be mounted because the file tipe isn't recognized... Up to now, i still didn't managed to find a software which recognize that .img If i try to convert it with IMG to ISO, it says that the IMG file system is not recognized .__.''

Naturally you can't convert the image to ISO, ISO is a CD format and completely different from a floppy file system.

I've had problems finding a good common file format to save all these floppy images with, seems every OS version tends to either read or not read it. Would be good with some suggestion on how to save these. Is there some kind of REAL "raw" format that is universally accepted (much like .img on PC which can be utilized through dozens of applications)?

It depends; I know that images created using HFVExplorer can be opened universally on any emulator (such as SheepShaver, Mini vMac, etc)...

If the resource fork of a compressed NDIF image is lost or damaged, the image is unrecoverable..
And by the filename I could see the disk image is from the Mac OS Anthology DVD

The Mac OS Anthology is a horrible source for OSes, for the record. It's missing a lot of languages, revisions and entire versions...plus a lot of the disk images are in some weird format that wouldn't work on emulators...

So the image file is unusable ? However, I'm downloading that Mac OS Antology DVDs from the FTP compilations... hope it works xDD

Apple never releases raw disk images....They would not care about emulators as well.
If you use an emulator you must preserve the resource fork of NDIF images, inject the disk image into the emulator disk image, and mount it within Mac OS with Disk Copy or Shrinkwrap...
Or you could convert the image to a more compatible format with Disk Utility if you use Mac OS X..

But there must be some better universal way to store floppy images that allows us to use it in Mac OS. Sure, the resource forks may be the most stupid idea in computing ever, but the resource fork can always be manually recreated if needed since it doesn't contain any vital info of the image itself, only info about the image file. One idea would simply be to properly (re)create the resource forks for the image files that needs it, and then pack it all with Stuffit or something. Then everything should be preserved no matter if you unpack it in Mac OS 7 or OS X. But then again, Stuffit is proprietary so perhaps some other format that is guaranteed to work in the future?

...or maybe encode the Disk Copy NDIF compressed using MacBinary II. This is only for compressed images only.