Category: Geeks r Us
as many of you know, I'm interested in having a high density floppy disk (either an LS120, an LS 240 or an 750mb zip disk) put in my machine. So what happens if I have a program that normally spans 10 1.44mb 3.5 inch (floppies and I put it on a higher capacity disk? What do I do when it asks me to install disk 2 etc? I've never figured this one out. Do I need to create some kind of batch file that would make it automatically load the disks or do I need to manually go into the directory and somehow load the files? What if I have a double-sided 5.25 inch floppy that I want to convert to a 3.5 inch disk? How do I get both sides onto the disk and make it see the entire program when installing it? These questions also apply to anything that was originally on a floppy that I put on cd rom or, more likely, on a compact flash card.
Well, I got the answer from another list. Apparently, some programs are smart enough to realise when the full program is in one location as opposed to their original disks and other programs need to be copied onto floppy if they came in a zip file or backed up to the same capacity and amount of floppies if I want to safeguard the originals. Otherwise, they won't install properly.
I don't know why, but I was thinking of Superdisks today, the ones that look exactly like 3.5 inch floppies but which hold alot more information. Anyway, I was wondering if I can copy each disk of a program onto one disk and put them in separate partitions or directories and then log onto said drives or change to said directories during the installation of the program. Basically, can I trick the program into thinking that I'm really using separate disks? That would make things alot easier, only I'd need to remember the directories. lol Perhaps, I can make a main directory for a program and put the disks in subdirectories. Also, when creating a drive, can I use a number like A1 or does it have to be only letters like AB?
only letters, and you're talking about installers that are really old: they don't know enough to do anything but procedural tasks ... wait for next disc, etc. The exceptions are those who prompt for a path.
Sounds like you want to put a turbo gasoline engine onto a plow from the 1300's while still using oxen ...
this is why modern programs use interfaces to access what they need, rather than call to / from directly, no matter how much one wishes to idealize things.
And, FWIW, you can only partition fixed disks.
Interesting. This then begs the question of when installers are actually needed versus when it's okay to make a program that can be copied into a directory with an exe file to get it started. It seemed more logical that installers would be used in programs which span multiple disks and that their main purpose would be to help the user set certain options regarding the installation. This seems especially useful in screenreaders, where you'd need to set things like synthesizer and com port, braille display or lack their of and which set files to install for various programs (Wordperfect 5.1 and not 6.0 or visa versa). But some installers just ask where the file should be put and maybe one or two other things which could easily be done via a first-run program or in the menus of the main program itself. This is something that I'll need to consider once I start writing things, whether or not each program requires an installer. I've also seen uninstallers, which I never really understood in DOS except that they might remove information from the autoexec.bat file. Most of the time, it's enough to empty the directory where the program was stored, go to the root directory and delete the directory in question.
When you say interfaces, do you mean the gui and buttons etc. or are you referreig to the way in which the installers are programmed? Oddly enough, procedural programming actual makes sense to me but all the rest seems foreign. I looked up fixed disks, since I've never heard the term, and it seems that you're referring to hard disks. Yet i'm pretty sure that I've heard of a way to use a bad floppy by having the os/drive skip over the bad sectors. Is this not some form of partitioning, though not in the common sense?
I've explained what APIs are before on other threads and I fear things are simply going circular.
No, fdisk isn't involved, scandisk is used to reserve the clusters as "bad" and when possible preserve the data, though PCTools was better at it and no I don't remember.
Gotcha about the api and the scanddisk versus fdisk. I'll look up PC Tools. They probably have some good utilities.