DiscClone  -  Disc duplicator

by Paul Ashmore

DiscClone allows you to copy a complete floppy disc image to your hard disc, from where it may be used to duplicate as many floppies as you like. It works with both standard density (800K) and high density (1.6Mb) discs. If you are copying a number of discs from one master, you will find this very much faster than using the Filer's Backup option. You can hold as many disc images as you like on your hard disc, as long as there is sufficient room.

The application cannot be run from this disc, so you must copy it to your hard disc before use. Running the item from the RISC User menu system opens a directory containing the !DiscClone application directory. You should drag this to the required location on your hard disc, from where it can be run by double-clicking on its icon. When run, an icon is installed on the icon bar. Clicking Menu over the icon opens a menu with Info and Quit options, which perform their usual functions.

Clicking Select on the icon bar icon opens the main window. A section at the left-hand side of the window contains three radio buttons allowing you to set the action currently being performed by the program. Read disc enables you to read in a floppy image; Duplicate allows you to duplicate an image to floppy discs; Delete allows you to delete an existing image from the hard disc. These will be described in turn.

To read in a master disc image, enter the disc name into the writable icon at the top of the window (this can be up to 10 characters). Make sure that the Read disc option has been selected, and if the disc is high density, select the 1.6Mb option icon in the centre of the window. Put the disc into the floppy drive, and click on the Start icon. If no disc is in the drive, a message will appear asking you to enter a disc. If you have a machine that auto detects when a disc is being entered into the drive, it will start to run automatically; if not, click on OK. When DiscClone has finished reading the disc (which it does in the background), a message will appear to tell you so. If you now click on the pop-up menu icon to the right of the writable icon, you will see that the name of the disc you have just read now appears on the menu, which indicates that the image has been stored by DiscClone for future use. Reading further disc images will add their names to the stored list.

To duplicate a disc, select the Duplicate option and enter the number of copies you would like. As before, you should select the high or low density option (if the disc image is low density, DiscClone will shade out the 1.6Mb option automatically).

When writing to a disc, if the disc is already in ADFS format DiscClone will reset the catalogue sectors before duplicating (this has the effect of a fast disc wipe). However, if the discs are new, or if they have previously been formatted to a non-ADFS format, you can instruct DiscClone to format them before duplicating, by selecting the Format icon.

To delete an image from the hard disc, select the Delete option and then choose the required image name from the menu. Now click on the Start icon and the image will be removed from the store (note that if you are deleting the only remaining image in the store, you may find under some circumstances that the name still appears in the menu after you have deleted it. If this happens, quit the program and re-load it, and you will now find that the image has been removed from the store.

DiscClone requires at least 2Mb for use with standard density discs, or 4Mb for high density discs. For the latter, a Wimp slot of 1900K is necessary. As supplied on this disc, the !Run file sets a Wimp slot of 1900K, so if you are using the program on standard density discs only, you can alter this to 864K. Bear in mind, though, that with the Wimp slot set to 864K, you should not try to read or write high density discs.

Copyright  RISC User 1994
