Hi, On Sat, Jun 23, 2018 at 8:09 PM, David McMackins <[email protected]> wrote: > > Finally, I also wrote a program called the Multi-Disk Split Archive > Installer (MDSAI) which is an installer program designed for deploying > software too big for a single floppy disk. You put the installer on the > first diskette, along with a file that describes what's being installed, > and then on each diskette, have a sequential piece of a ZIP archive. > MDSAI will cat them together and then extract in the C drive.
Sounds good. Now, don't take this the wrong way, but .... PKZIP already had split disk support. I don't remember if Info-Zip ever fully added it. I think their workaround was some tool to manually make separate .ZIPs (if possible) of a certain size. That is, fully intact .ZIPs that don't need special tools to reconstruct. Of course, it's easy to write a very simple split tool and put separate files on separate disks. Then even "copy /b blah + blah2 blah.zip" would work. But what about error checking? Especially on fragile floppies. I don't remember how much, if any, PKZIP handled. I think RAR was known for some redundancy, but I don't recall how well other archivers were about that. If your floppy had some bad sectors, you'd still want to recover as much as possible. Or if you lose one floppy, you might still want to rebuild the .ZIP (e.g. 10 out of 12 working floppies should be good enough, in a perfect world). The good thing about non-solid archives like .ZIP is that if one file is corrupt, you can still unpack the others. That's why solid archives are generally shunned for recovery purposes. I think some archivers can do semi-solid (RAR and 7Z), which is a good middle ground. I'm far from an expert in this area. I don't mean to complain, just bringing up some obvious worries. Some files are worth more than others, and some should be better preserved. You know, "an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure", etc. etc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
