[Coco] Archiving a floppy disk collection

[Aaron Wolfe]

This would certainly work, and works with DW4 just like DW3 and below
so long as you leave hdbdos translation turned off.

Personally, I find single disk images much more useful than big
multi-disk beasts.  One advantage is simply that each disk then get's
its own file name and you can browse through them when choosing what
to mount.  Of course that only works if your disks are in files with
useful names, and when thinking about copying hundreds of disks maybe
naming each file would be too much work.

If you did want to make individual .dsk files, you could automate the
process to a large degree using the dw command when in OS9.  For
instance, a command like:

dw disk create 3 /disks/myprogram.dsk

will eject any disk in drive 3, create a new blank image at
/disks/myprogram.dsk, and insert it in drive 3.  you could then just
copy source to disk 3, rinse and repeat.  maybe make a little script
to automate further.

In DECB, unfortunately we don't have a dw command interface (yet?).
However, the GUI does provide exactly the same command set, you just
have to type them into the entry box at the bottom of the server side
screen instead of doing everything right at the coco.  That might
still be a timesaver.

-Aaron







On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 10:16 AM, Frank Pittel <fwp at deepthought.com> wrote:
>
> While I'm sure that Aaron will know of a much better and smarter way to do this but with at
> least drivewire 2 & 3 you could have 4 disk groups of 255 floppies each. Subtract the first
> four for physical floppies and and that leave 251 for a total of 1004 floppies. Even I could
> write a simple basic program to increment a counter to loop from 3-255 and with another
> counter going from 0-3 using the "drive #x" command! :-)
>
> That should keep your fussing on the server side of drivewire to a minimum. I've already done
> this on a much smaller scale with 20-30 floppies that I bought at auction at a coco fest a few
> years ago.
>
> The Other Frank
>
> PS - Don't want to start any wars about legal rights or issues but have you given any thoughts
> about making the drivewire images available for download? Assuming that it's legal for you to
> do so of course!
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 07:46:11AM -0500, Allen Huffman wrote:
>> On Mar 21, 2012, at 7:24 AM, Robert Gault wrote:
>> > Allen, could you be more specific about what you want to do? It reads to me that you want to put a disk into the Coco and a blank image into Drivewire. Then backup the Coco disk to the Drivewire mounted disk.
>> > If that is correct, you don't need any programs, just Drivewire4. The exception would be for copyright protected disks.
>>
>> Yes, but I don't want to do that for 1000 floppy disks, so I am going to write a program so all I do is swap a disk, type in what it is (disk label), and hit ENTER, and it cranks away.
>>
>> -
>> Allen Huffman - PO Box 22031 - Clive IA 50325 - 515-999-0227 (vmail/TXT only)
>> Sent from my MacBook.
>>
>>
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