midkiff@uicsrd.csrd.uiuc.edu (03/02/89)
The brother of a friend recently got an Apple II/GS, with a 5.25 and a 3.5
inch drive. He has worked very little with computers, and I (and my
friend) have worked very little with Apples, so excuse the basic nature
of these questions.
Anyway, we were trying to make backups of diskettes, using the disk copy
utility on the system tools diskette. Copying a 3.5 inch disk requires
about 60-100 disk swaps. Given that he has a 768K system, this seems
ridiculous. Anyone have any pointers to a better way of doing this?
The copy utility claims to have a default smart mode that only copies
blocks that are actually used. The manual claims that this mode sometimes
doesn't work. When backing up one disk, (3.5 in, commercial) no error
messages were encountered during the copy, but when later attempting to run
the software, the program would start, and then "freeze". Does this sound
like the failure behavior for the "smart" mode, or a form of copy protection?
I think "Magicspellers" was the name of the software.
While attempting to back up a commercial 5.25 inch disk, we got a message
saying something along the lines of "format not recognized", and were
then asked if we wanted to reformat the disk. The disk works with
Apple II/Apple II+, GS, etc. Was the message the result of a copy
protection scheme, or something else? "Bagasaurus", put out by the
Electric Street people, was the name of this software.
Sorry if these questions don't make sense, or if the answers are obvious
to anyone who has used an Apple for over an hour. Replies by e-mail will
probably reduce the boredom factor for the rest of the net. And many,
many thanks to those who reply.
Sam Midkiff
UUCP: {seismo,pur-ee,convex}!uiucdcs!uicsrd!midkiff
ARPANET: midkiff%uicsrd@a.cs.uiuc.edu
CSNET: midkiff%uicsrd@uiuc.csnet
BITNET: midkiff@uicsrd.csrd.uiuc.edu