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From: taak9@isuvax.iastate.edu (Steve Sheldon)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc
Subject: Re: Creating phony floppies on the fly
Message-ID: <1991May14.012456.4618@news.iastate.edu>
Date: 14 May 91 01:24:56 GMT
References: <192118ea.ARN0ce8@umcvmb.missouri.edu>,<1991May13.055135.16753@sbcs.sunysb.edu>
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In article <1991May13.055135.16753@sbcs.sunysb.edu>, dtiberio@eeserv1.ic.sunysb.edu (David Tiberio) writes:
>In article <192118ea.ARN0ce8@umcvmb.missouri.edu> c506634@umcvmb.missouri.edu (Eric Edwards) writes:
>>I would like to create temporary floppy sized partitions on my hard drive. 
>>That is, i would like to create any number of these "phony floppies" on my
>>hard drive without reformating.  When I am done with them I would like to be 
>>able to remove them and get the space back.
>> 
>
>  I always wanted this too, since I have no permanent floppy drive with
>my computer. However, I made an 880k rad: drive that does the job. If anyone
>has info on the hard drive floppy, please let me know.

 Yeah, the RAD: device will work.  If you wanted 20 of these, and unless you
had an A3000 with lots of RAM(expensive), you'd run into some problems.

 I understand what he wants.  Back in the days of CP/M(Sheesh, I'm only 22, and
I feel old) we didn't have lharc, or arc, or zoo, etc.  We had two utilities
Squeeze, and Library.  Squeeze did basic Huffman encoding on files to make
'em smaller.  But it would only do one file at a time, and it just created
a new file with a 'Q' in the extension.
 The Library utility would allow you to combine multiple files into one big
file.  And it created a new file with .LBR as an extension.
 See, arc, zoo, lharc, etc. have combined these two utilities into one, not
to mention they've improved the idea a lot.

 So what does this have to do with the 880K partition on the hard disk?
 Well, I also had a utility called LBRDISK.  In effect, it was a device driver
that allowed you to assign a .LBR file as a disk device.
 Sort of like saying, ASSIGN C: = Myfile.LBR.  So whenever you would access
the C: drive, you were really accessing the contents of the .LBR file.
 
 It was really pretty neat.  So what we want on the Amiga is something a lot
like this, rather than creating a new partition, we would just create one
big 880K file.  And then some sort of device driver that would in effect
make this big file look like a disk.  Sort of like RAD: does with RAM.

 Now I suppose we could ask two questions:
 1. Who's going to write it?
 2. Why not just use RAD: to begin with?

Steve Sheldon               /// |  Do not write in this space
taak9@ccvax.iastate.edu    ///  |
Senior, Computer Science \XX/   |    For Office Use Only