ART100@psuvm.psu.edu (Andy Tefft) (07/26/90)
When shrinkit first came out I was a little upset at the fact that you needed two drives to unpack a whole disk (source drive and dest drive) and either two drives or enough room on the single drive to unpack a file archive. I asked Andy Nicholas for the capability to do things with one drive, no matter HOW many disk swaps it would take :-) He eventually did it, but I never really figured out how to do it, and by then it didn't matter to me since I bought a used Unidisk. But then this 8/16 magazine came across comp.binaries.apple2 and running it through sciibin and nulib before even thinking of downloading told me it was indeed a shrunk 800k disk, and at 300+k, too large to put on the 5.25" for unshrinking. So I decided to see if I could unpack a 3.5" disk archive with only one 3.5" disk. Turns out it's a little tricky, but it works ok if you don't mind a lot of disk swaps. First you select the archive as you normally would. When you're shown the list of files in the archive, though, put the blank 3.5" disk in the drive. When you select the disk image to extract, shrinkit will not try and read any info from the source file, but instead immediately look for the destination disk, putting up the "select device" dialog. Since you've put in the blank disk, you can choose it and then you will be prompted for source and dest disks for the rest of the process. The trick here is inserting the destination disk before you hit "return" to start the extraction. If you don't, shrinkit will search the devices before you have time to put it in, and the only 3.5" disk you will be able to choose will be the source disk, which you obviously DO NOT want to do. Of course, if you can put the source archive on another device to begin with, you don't have to worry about all this.