<>@6 °ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø *4@2 DRIVING HARDER STILL! *3]5@5 by Slade / PTK *1]1@6 ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø°ø° @2 *2 RECAP @1*1 If you read the little article on hard drives in the last issue then you'll know what I'm going on about. If you didn't, then why not... @1G@2E@3T @4A @5B@6A@7C@2K @1I@2S@3S@4U@5E @7N@1O@2W@1!@2!! @1 So you've got your back issue and read it, and you read the little bit at the bottom that said in this issue I will be dealing with installing software onto our brand new hard drive. @2*2 WHERE TO START *1@1 With the hard drive you've got, you should have also got an install disk. This may be a .DMS file that is already on your hard drive. If it is then you must decompress it now and store in a cool, dry place out of sunlight! This disk contains the software needed to install the Workbench disks. If you were one of the lucky ones then your hard drive was installed with Workbench already and there may also be some PD on it as well. The install disk may be the original Commodore install disk or the newer Amiga Tech one. It may even be a third party one like FaSTTTPREPPP. As you will probably have noticed, there is a hard drive installer on this disk to install the magazine. Although it is not the best around, it will install the magazine into a partition and directory of your choice. There is an installer for each issue. Although the installer copies all the disk to the hard drive, you don't need the LIBS directory so you can delete it. But only if you have the CRM.library in your normal LIBS directory. This will save you space. The installer has been written for the people who don't have a lot of experience with the use of the shell, and therefore would not be able to install the magazine normally. If you load the installer into a text reader you will see that It looks similiar to some type of computer language. The actual langague is called the lisp langauge and it had been cut down for use in the installer. In the C directory of this disk you will find the installer. This is a 63K interpreter for the script that I have wrote. Although, you are supposed to be registered to officially use the installer, I don't think Commodore would mind, seeing as they no longer exist! You should be able to read the script and see what it does, just by reading it. If you want to learn a bit more about the installer, try and find some more scripts with a few more commands in. The Cygnus Ed one that I used to install this very Word Processor had a lot of options and is well recommended. It was on the cover of the November 1995 issue of Amiga Computing. GET A BACK ISSUE! *2@2 PARTITIONING YOUR DRIVE *1@1 I recommend that you have a 25MB bootable partition, then have a Games partition and the rest as a Work partition. The size of the last two would depend on how much software you have (e.g. the more games, the bigger the Games partition). The Games partition should be divided into sections if you have loads of games. As a personal preference I don't have any directories with icons on my Work partition as it makes loading text and stuff a lot harder, as directory scans are longer. The best directory structure is to have only about six main directorys on the root directory. Mine are: *3@4 Coverdisks - @1 Coverdisks and related files. They are checked and then moved to other directories. @4 Utils -@1 The biggest directory on my hard drive. It contains most if not all of my utils. @4 Programming - @1 Depends if you can program or not, if you have one of these. You could always follow my tutorial and start learning today. @4 Personal -@1 Contains some of the larger programs. @4 TEXT - @1 Where all the text goes. (NOT!) @4 STUFF/TEMP - @1A temporary store before I get around to sorting everything out. *1@1 Keeping the number of directories down will mean that the windows appear faster. Also keeping all your important data in it's own personal directory will make backing up the drive a lot easier. Well, I hope you enjoyed this little article double bill, and if you have any questions then write to me. My address is in the mag somewhere. I hope you found the installers useful and if you think you can do better... and you should be able to! Then send them to me at the usual address. *4 @7 !! STOP PRESS !! *1@1 I have had a number of games on disk that, although they had proper installers, wouldn't work! This was the case with Syndicate and a few others in my collection. I then changed the MaX Transfer Rate of my drive and every thing worked fine. The transfer rate can be changed using HDToolBox. Click on the partition drive box and then on the first partition. Then click the advanced options one. This leads to a bigger screen and then max transfer will probably read 1xffffff or something like that. Change it to 0x1fe00 and everything should be fine. Repeat this for each partition and save the changes. You don't need to reformat the drive so it's really easy to do and means you will be able to play the damn game from your hard drive now. Some games, although they don't have their own installers can be installed to hard drive. I have installed a number of games this way including Championship Manager 93. All you have to do is copy the disks to a drawer. Then assign the disk names to that drawer.*3@4 e.g. assign Disk_1: Games:Champ_93 *1@1 Repeat for the number of disks and then run the game. It should now work from your hard drive. There are even some installers that will install non-DOS disks to hard drive. Although they need a lot of memory and are quite hard to use, they're well worth it to install good games.