Massive disk archiving project - Need HELP! (Cincy, OH)

[broken]

I recently saw a posting on Craigslist for someone selling a bunch of Commodore and Amiga hardware and software. The guy wanted to sell all the Commodore stuff together in one lot and all the Amiga stuff together in another, so I couldn't pick and choose what I wanted from the Amiga stuff - had to take it all.


Welllll....Once I showed up and saw how much software there was I about passed out.

I picked up 6 very large pull out drawers full of disks and about 10 or so of the smaller double row disk boxs. The kind that holds like 80 or 100 disks.


I think all together I picked up around 2500 disks and I don't know what to do with all of them. I have been thinking that perhaps they all need to be archived. I know a lot of the stuff is probably already available online, but who knows how much isn't. This guy had mountains and mountains of copied/cracked software and there is a decent chance a lot of it could be NTSC stuff that you don't see very often.



I am looking for advice on where to even begin with a project like this.

The picture below is just one of six of the large pull out drawers full of games/apps. The drawer isn't even pulled all the way out - at least another inch or two it could come out. I estimate each one holds somewhere around 320 to 350 disks. Plus I have all the smaller disk boxes.

[Xanxi]

Fortunately, the amiga can use 4 disk drives at a time with multitasking, so you can adf them in about 1250 minutes (with 2 minutes per disk for verifying), that makes about 21 hours of non stop work if the miggy is not dead before ^_^

[broken]

lol I think my poor 1200 would catch on fire trying that. Or at least burn up a couple floppy drives.

Never thought of doing 4 at a time. Does that really work?

[redrumloa]

lol I think my poor 1200 would catch on fire trying that. Or at least burn up a couple floppy drives.
 
Never thought of doing 4 at a time. Does that really work?

That is one hardware feature Commodore Amigas have I have not seen on another platform, the ability to use 4 floppy drives at the same time while still multitasking. Yes it can.
 
You may want to create the ADFs to RAM Disk first if you have enough RAM, I don't know how the 1200 HD IDE interface would like 4 writes at once.

[Daedalus]

The A1200 IDE interface shouldn't have much trouble keeping up with 4 writes at a time at floppy speeds - at 2 minutes/disk that's still only a sustained write speed of around 30kB/second (by my in-head calculations). Since the floppy drives are handled mainly by the custom chips, Amigas have always been very good at using them while doing something else. I've never used more than 2 at a time, but you could certainly copy to/from both without and signs of stressing the machine.

Edit: Of course, it will depend on the ADF-making software supporting such an operation... I've never tried making an ADF from anything other than DF0:

[broken]

Edit: Of course, it will depend on the ADF-making software supporting such an operation... I've never tried making an ADF from anything other than DF0:

See thats kinda what I was wondering. What software would support dumping multiple floppies at the same time to adf.

[Daedalus]

It's a long time since I've done it, but I'm sure there's some system-friendly software out there which lets you choose which floppy drive and which file to save it as. Once it does that, just run 4 copies of it and you're away - provided your LMB is up to the task ;-)

[Xanxi]

See thats kinda what I was wondering. What software would support dumping multiple floppies at the same time to adf.

Just launch four times TSGui. Multitask rulez! You guys have been using Windows for too long!

[mongo]

Never thought of doing 4 at a time. Does that really work?

No. There's only one floppy controller, and it can only read from one drive at a time.

[gazgod]

Personally if I had a huge project like this to do, I'd get a catweazel and use a pc floppy drive in a pc. There no point killing already scarce and possibly already dieing amiga floppy drives when there is an alternative.

Gaz

[som99]

Personally if I had a huge project like this to do, I'd get a catweazel and use a pc floppy drive in a pc. There no point killing already scarce and possibly already dieing amiga floppy drives when there is an alternative.

Gaz

I agree, I would do the same

[Xanxi]

I am pretty sure that i can use all the drives at the same time. As i own also a catweasel with PC drive in my A1200T, i will give it a try with no less than 5 drives as soon as i can dig out my external drives (maybe this sunday).

[jsixis]

I have close to 200 floppy disks copied on my hardrive as floppy disk so I can just dump them to a floppy and they work as a floppy. You have to copy as is (I think that is the term)

Myself I only archived programs that I used.
On another subject
Caligri 24 if you have that I would really love to buy it.
Had it on a demo disk, it was a program I could use but the company vanished from the Amiga before I could buy it and I've never seen it since.

[Xanxi]

I am pretty sure that i can use all the drives at the same time. As i own also a catweasel with PC drive in my A1200T, i will give it a try with no less than 5 drives as soon as i can dig out my external drives (maybe this sunday).

I update this thread because i have finally tried what i said earlier.
However i didn't use 5 drives because my tower with the cateweasel has died this summer.
I used 3 drives, one internal and two external on my desktop A1200 and it worked flawlessly.
I have lauched 3 times TSGUI and saved at the same time 3 adf from DF0:, DF1: and DF2:
The good miggy was also playing some mods with Delitracker and browsing the web with Miami and Ibrowse.
True multitasking indeed!!

[Jope]

Only use one drive. The Amiga will spin them all simultaneously but it will read only one at a time.

You'll just slow down the process if you read more than one drive at a time.

As for the software, use Icycool's diskripper, which is just perfect for making images of a large amount of disks. You can edit the next disk's filename as you read the previous one and it autoincrements the number if you have a number at the end of the filename.

http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/DiskRipper1.52