[arachne] Re: Getting Arachne to run on a 286

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On Tue, 23 Jun 2009 08:02:49 -0700 (PDT), Mr Ian Primus wrote:

> Excellent! Thanks! I'll try that out as soon as I get a chance. My only gripe
> before was how difficult it was to get the file over to the 286. You see, that
> machine has a 1.2mb and a 360k floppy drive. And the Arachne installer is like
> 1.3 meg. I managed to do it the last time by using a little kludge program on
> the 286 to format an 85 track (yes, five more than normal) HD floppy. I was
> incredibly suprised that it formatted at all, but I was more suprised when the
> disk actually WORKED in other computer. Don't think I could get another track
> out of it though, I could hear the head hit the stop on the last step.

One method is to archive the file with ARJ into chunks that will fit on
whatever size floppy disk you want to use. The segments will have the
extensions ARJ, A01, A02 etc. Because of the different extensions, it
can be done entirely on the hard disk of one machine, then the files
copied to floppies, then copied from there to the HDD of the other
machine before being unarchived. If there are any errors then the
original files still exist on the other machine. It is also possible to
use a single floppy disk to trandsfer the segments, but it is faster
with two so that a segment can be copied from the first computer while
the previous segment is being loaded from the other disk to the second
computer.

You should be able to find ARJ on one of the free DOS download sites. It
has an enormous help file which is basically its documentation.

The command to archive the file is
   ARJ a -v360 -y [archive] [filename]
where the -v360 allows multiple segments of 360kb each, and -y means to
go directly to writing successive segments (assumed "Yes").

To extract the file the command is
   ARJ e -v -y [archive]

I once used this method to transfer a file of over 100 megabytes between
two computers using the 1.44mb 3-1/2" floppy drives. Because of
compression, it was done in only 38 segments.

This process can also be done with PKZIP, but in that case the segments
have to be written directly to separate floppies, so you will need
sufficient floppies to hold the whole of the archived file. They need to
be clearly numbered as extracting the file requires that they be read in
the exact order they were created. It also means that any errors that
occur in the transfer of the segments or the extraction of the file
require that the whole archiving process be redone from scratch.

    Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
    and remember what peace there may be in silence.
        "Desiderata", Max Ehrmann, copyright 1952.

   ,-./\
  /     \ From Greg Mayman, in beautiful Adelaide, South Australia
  \_,-*_/   "Queen City of The South"  35d 01'44"S  138d 32'13"E
       v
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