Black Monks are proud to present: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ PCOPY Pcopy was made to produce large amounts of different copies in busy environs. Like: People are talking to you and you are searching programs for them in databases. Others want information how to install some driver. You divert people to others you know to be an authority on their problems. You are copying PD and you have an arrears of two hours. People ask whether their disks are ready yet. What are you copying at the moment? What have you already done? When to insert the next set? Pcopy shows the actual situation conveniently arranged, starts upon disk insertion, and produces reliable copies, because it can verify the written data. Pcopy does not copy copy-protected disks. At least not that I know. Its working is similar to that of Trackdisk (The software that normally controls the drives). If Trackdisk cannot read a disk, than Pcopy probably will not be able too. If your source disk is failing, you can let Pcopy try to produce a copy with the original data recovered. Although Pcopy displays a lot of information, I think it is a rather dangerous copier (on behalf of its autostart capabilities) and its application 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. It is also possible to give the drivenames on the commandline. Pcopy will check for drive presence and type. If the selected drives are available, DOS is asked to stay away from them. 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 disknames appear in these windows. If the disk cannot produce a name, a classification is displayed. All text different from is printed in another color. (black) In the window "Copy history" appear the names of all successfully copied disks. If you want a name to disappear, double click on it. In the progression window the progress of the copy process is graphical presented. Although the depth gadgets are invisible during the copy, they still exist and work. The graph shows first where pcopy HAS written. Another color displays verify. If the same track is to be written more than once, the color will change again. The number tells on which cylinder Pcopy has written last. Further there is the control panel with the gadgets in it. GADGETS -- Verify ON/OFF The destination disk is read back and compared with the write buffer. It can be turned on and off during the copy process. -- DFx: --> DFy: Defines which drive is source and which is destination. Clicking the arrow reverses the direction. -- Adapt Date DOS can distinguish the copy from the original if the creation and last altered date and time are different on both disks. If there are two disks present with the same volumename and date/time, DOS will crash. To prevent this, the standard Diskcopy changes these fields. Also if the BMFLAG is -1, it changes it to +1. Pcopy can do this too, thus preventing to create an exact copy. Also if some read error could not be repaired, Pcopy can set this flag to zero. This all happens with this gadget set to "ON". Set to "OFF", the copy will be exact (if possible). -- Start Copy To be used to start the copy process manually. The command is hold 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. This gadget changes into a "Stop Copy" gadget during copying. A confirmation is required. Disk removal, source as well as destination, is handled as a confirmed "Stop Copy". -- Auto Start Condition This whole area is a gadget. Click in it to cycle the four stages. See auto start for details. -- Triangle gadget In the topborder there is a gadget with a triangle. This gadget affects the way Pcopy behaves to other disk users. Its usage of the drive hardware it so intensive, that normally (triangle pointing up) other users do not get access to their drives. You can let Pcopy be a little more modest by letting this gadget point down. This costs from 3 to 70 seconds or more copy time. AUTO START When a disk is inserted, it is classified. To do so, the root track is read and analyzed. If an error is detected while reading this track, Pcopy tries to repair the track to make this classification safe. Four different types are distinguished and its classification appears in the "Now in .." window: -- New, Unformatted No data is detected. -- Non DOS Some data is found. But its format is not the normal Amiga format. -- DOS, no root The track can be read, but the root sector was not found. -- The root is found and the name of the disk is displayed. Now that Pcopy knows what kind of disk its dealing with, it can let the copy start depending on a user selected condition. These are listed: -- Off: Manual Start Pcopy does not start copy until the Start gadget is clicked. -- Dest must be New Pcopy starts only when a disk is classified as "New, Unformatted". The formats that are known to be detected are MS-DOS, MSX, Archimedes, Atari and Mac. Probably most other formats are detected too, but you must check it for yourself. -- Dest may not be DOS Pcopy starts only when a disk is classified as "New, Unformatted" OR "Non DOS". By other systems already formatted disks are overwritten. -- Unconditional Start Starts always upon insertion. If the disk is not write protected, it is simply overwritten. This is a dangerous selection and is emphasized by changing the gadget's color. If an Amiga-DOS disk is to be overwritten, some sound is heard and a three second delay will elapse before the copy process starts. When you remove the disk within this delay or click the "Stop Copy" gadget, no writing has taken place. You can look at the Progression window, and if no graph or number is visible, you were in time. I can only say: Do not use this selection. REQUESTERS If an error is detected, 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, head z. Retry tries to read again. Salve tries to repair the faulting track by multiple reads and analysis. Copy continues after this action. Destination write error # xx On cylinder # yy, head z. Retry tries to write again. Verify error # xx On cylinder # yy, head z. Retry rewrites the track and checks again. If you do not know what the errors mean, ignore them. Do a few retries and abort if no success. Some actions produce confirmation requesters, like Stop Copy and the standard stop gadget. These are straightforward. But perhaps the system is too low on memory to honor the memory requests to build the requester. Then some defaults become active: "Abort" and "User was serious". The requester is not a true requester but a window with gadgets. So if you use DMouse in a certain way, you have to place the mouse pointer in this requester to use the standard keyboard shortcuts. TRACK SALVAGE Pcopy has capabilities to recover data from a damaged track. The history window changes into a report window. Each salved track produces two lines. The line starting with 'L' reports the not recovered labels. The 'S' reports not recovered sectors. Behind the 'S' and 'L' the tracknumber is displayed. If the line remains empty, you are lucky. Otherwise the numbers of the not recovered labels or sectors will appear. Normally labels are not used, and diskcopy does not copy them at all. So ignore the label report. The not recovered sectors are more important. A disk that has been completely copied, but with one or more not recovered sectors, appears Italic in the history window. The report remains visible as long as the destination disk stays in the drive. A special Pcopy pattern ('Pcopy2',X,0) is written into not recovered sectors. In that case if "Adapt Date" is ON, the BMFLAG is made 0. PERFORMANCE Pcopy is fast (The fastest). The best times: 100/68 seconds, verify ON/OFF. Pcopy tries to be friendly to other tasks, it leaves them a lot of time. But in its disk use it is truly unfriendly. Therefore you can force Pcopy to give way to other tasks which want to use the disk hardware (other drives than those controlled by (this) Pcopy, of course). It is recommended to install TrackSalve when Pcopy is used on a system with more than two drives. In the Trackdisk.device is a nasty bug which can interfere with Pcopy. Nevertheless pcopy will deliver good copies. HISTORY Pcopy 2.0 is a rewrite of Pcopy 1.0.(Fish 151). The copier mostly in assembly and the user interface in C. The user interface became a separate task. Pcopy uses ONLY code and data derived from the original .i and .h files. Therefore I think it will be compatible with future releases of the OS. Pcopy 2.01. The audio.device is not to be accessed in the standard way, as I read recently in a publication of Commodore. Pcopy used the standard method and sometimes the audio.device died. Pcopy waited for a reply.. forever... The algorithms of the size of the requester and its gadgets used the default font instead of the font of the screen on which Pcopy executes. The requesters now are perhaps a little nicer when other fonts are used. The salve routine has been made a little more efficient without changing its functionality. This results into a quicker login of non-Dos disks and a slightly shorter track salvage. Pcopy 2.02. The progression graph now reflects write, verify and rewrite. Pcopy 2.1. Better salve routines. The routines in TrackSalve are far superior to the old ones in Pcopy. These routine are now replaced. Pcopy 2.11. If just a sync was found, Pcopy classified the disk as "Amiga format, no root" instead of "No Amiga format". Pcopy 2.12. Stupid. Both release versions 2.1 and 2.11 were by a compile time flag actually debug versions with the salve function partial disabled. FUTURE The way the drives are snached away from the system while remainingg disk-multitasking, prevents an easy adaption of dynamic drive allocation. That would be the most obvious improvement of the program at the moment. Multi-destination is out of the question, because it is not a design aim. Turbobackup has it implemented. Besides that, the autostart logic is already dreadful. Because Intuition is not that friendly in its cpu usage, it should be better to have less windows open. Therefore the graph could be displayed in the control window and the other windows could be made removable (recoverable). A configfile. Available drives investigation. And single drive operation. And multiple copy. Etc. etc. Guess who is silly. First some money now with this machine. COPYRIGHT Copyright 1989, 1990 D.W.Reisig. Pcopy is freely distributable (FreeWare). All you may charge for is medium costs. You must include this file (Pcopy.doc) with the program (Pcopy). You are not allowed to pass these files if changed. If you have any suggestions or remarks: Dirk W. Reisig Woudweeren 10 1151 AV Broek in Waterland The Netherlands (Holland) Call our favourite BBS for all Black Monks releases: CENTRAL EUROPE !!! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ d/l FROM BATMAN^ROBIN BBS [ P A R A D O X ]