PCOPY Pcopy was made to produce large amounts of different copies, and in the process not to lose content. Pcopy shows the actual situation, conveniently arranged, and is able to verify the written data. The produced copy is not exact. The "last altered date and time" as well the "volume creation date and time" are changed to the present date and time. Also if the BMFLAG is -1, it is changed to +1, otherwise it remains unchanged. These changes are identical to the changes made by the Amiga diskcopy program. Although pcopy displays a lot of information, it is a rather dangerous copier and its purpose lies in the production area. START Pcopy can be executed from either the CLI or the Workbench. Two trackdisk-drives must be available. That is, ie., the internal and a normal external drive. Selection is done by clicking on/off gadgets in a window. When ready, one can proceed by clicking "DONE". If more than two (or less than two!) drives are selected then clicking done has no effect. Pcopy will check for disk presence and identity. (Selected drives may not be the same, perhaps done by assign). If the selected drives are available DOS is switched off. Pcopy takes control of the drives (as does diskcopy) and sets up the user interface. WINDOWS There are two small windows (marked "Now in DFx:") which show, at any moment, the drive's contents. An empty window means an empty drive. Normally the diskname appears in these windows. If the disk cannot produce a name, a classification is displayed. All text different from [VolumeName] is printed in another color. In the window "Copy history" appear all names of successfully copied disks. There is a window with a kind of "scale". Although the depthgadgets disappear during the copy, they still exist and work. Then there is the control panel with the gadgets in it. GADGETS Verify ON/OFF The destination disk is read back and compared with the source. It can be turned on and off during the the copy process. DFx: --> DFy: Defines which is source and which is destination drive. The choice is acknowledged by a different color of the destination drive. Auto Start ON/OFF If this is off, a copy cycle is started by clicking "Start Copy". If it is on, then this is started by the INSERTION of the second disk. It is possible to set some additional conditions. Start Copy To be used to start the copy process manually. The command is kept until it is possible to start the copy process (two disks inserted). A second click before the process is started will nullify the start command. AUTO START Non DOS ON/OFF Unreadable ON/OFF These two gadgets control the auto-start conditions. These two gadgets admit four possible states, however, only three logical states exist. Implemention of the fourth was beyond my "implementationwillingness". The logical states are: 1) Start anyhow. 2) Destination may not be an Amiga-DOS disk. 3) Destination must be unreadable. 1) Start always. If the disk is not write protected, it is simply overwritten. This is a dangerous selection and is emphasized by an exclamation mark. If an Amiga-DOS disk is to be overwritten, the display beeps and a two second delay will elapse before the copy process starts. Unless you want to get rid of a lot of old disks, I STRONGLY suggest you do NOT use this selection. You'd better use the manual start (I know). The switches are: Non DOS OFF, Unreadable OFF. 2) Destination may not be an Amiga-DOS disk. During the search for the volumename, there was no indication found, which might lead to the assumption that the destination disk could be an Amiga-DOS disk. (oef!) By other systems, already formatted disks are overwritten. The switches: Non DOS ON, Unreadable OFF. 3) Destination must be unreadable. The copy process will be started only if no data is detected. For owners of different machines, this is not foolproof. MS-DOS, MSX, Archimedes and Atari formats will be seen as readable, but Alas!, Mac is not. I did not have more formats available during testing. I see this as the normal selection. For distribution you normally use new disks. Switches: Non DOS (don't care), Unreadable ON. REQUESTERS If the process is interrupted, a requester will appear. If abort is chosen, then the copy process will be terminated. The actions following upon retry are listed below: Source read error # xx On cylinder # yy Retry tries to read again. Destination write error # xx On cylinder # yy Retry tries to write again. Destination read error # xx (Verify) On cylinder # yy Retry writes again. Destination verify error on cyl # yy Retry rewrites the cylinder. Pcopy refuses to continue after disk removal. Therefore, it is not useful to select retry after a writeprotect detection. The error #'s are those from trackdisk. They are: 20-27 data error (retry) 28 write protected (abort) 29 disk change or absent (abort) 30 seek error (retry) 31 short of memory (retry, check multitasking) 32-35 pcopy fault (abort, quit, reboot?) (Details: KRM Libraries and Devices, page 271) CLASSIFICATION Unreadable: During the read of sector 0, there was no sector header found. Non DOS: During the read of sector 0, a sector header was found, but the sector was unreadable or it was not an Amiga-DOS sector. ("DOS\0" or "KICK"). Near DOS: The format and data of sector 0 was Amiga-DOS, but this was all. PERFORMANCE Pcopy is as fast as diskcopy, at least if verify is off. To copy a cylinder the disk must make 7 revolutions. If verify is on, 4 more are needed. Times are 1.33 minutes without verify and 2.27 minutes with verify. Perhaps this can be reduced to 5/7 revolutions and 1.06/1.33 minutes. Maybe for some later revision with its own device driver. At the moment, pcopy is clean. I mean no tricks, just proper systemcalls. VERIFY POLICY The absence of verify with diskcopy was also a stimulus to make pcopy. If you use it to make a backup of your labour disk, verify is not important. If an error occurs, the chance it is precisely on an important spot is small. And there are a lot of possibilities to salve a disk. This is different with a PD disk. If you have a PD disk with an error, then it is difficult or impossible to repair. So be attentive to what you copy and pass on of PDS. Someone four copies away, can have great difficulties, because content that he has could be defective, and the defects have a snow-balling effect. So please use verify. An example: I have all Fish disks and the CRC program on F133 discovered +/- 300 errors in my library. So the route to me was rough (and without verify). I like to receive mail, so if you have any suggestions or remarks: Dirk Reisig Woudweeren 10 1151 AV Broek in Waterland Netherland (or Holland)