Copying Diskettes

June 18, 1999

Jim Harwood

 

 

  1. Type UTILS
  2. Place the disk to be copied from in Drive 0 and the disk to be copied to in Drive 1. Make sure its write enable tab is covering the notch.
  3. Type BACKUP
    You are asked if you are sure. Type YES .
  4. The copy proceeds as the entire useable area of Drive 0 is copied to Drive 1. At the conclusion, you get an -OK. It takes a few minutes.
  5. Repeat starting at (2) for the next disk.
  6. Type PROG to get back to what you were doing before the copying.

If a diskette error occurs during the transfer, you are told what block created the error. Blocks 0 -499 are on Drive 0, 500 - 999 on Drive 1. Sometimes it is a soft error; hit <CR> a couple of times to retry. If the retry takes, the copy continues.

If the medium error is hard, and it occurred on the destination disk, try another disk. If the disk you are copying from has the error, things are more difficult. What I do in that case is copy up to the bad block as so, assuming the bad block is 273: 0 272 UP then 274 499 UP which finishes the disk except for 273. As you probably guessed, the UP command copies a series of blocks to the diskette in the upper drive. I then get another diskette that I know has a good copy of the bad block on it, put it in Drive 0, and copy 273 to the upper drive, as so: 273 273 UP .