Help please

[Phil]

I have a copy of DSS real sky southern sky survey 11 CDs . Can any one tell me how to copy then to my hard drive. I have tryed but cannot get then on my hard drive. Any help would be great.
Phil

[Dennis]

Hi Phil

It is a long and weary process….or at least it was for me with all 18 of the CD’s.

You need to copy them into the root directory. In my case, they are not on my C: Drive (which I reserve only for applications) but are on my D: Drive.

So, create a Folder called e.g. DSS in the root directory – not in a nested Folder.

Copy the contents of each CD into this DSS directory, 1 CD at a time and this takes ages; the 18 CD’s have something like 1,300,000+ Folders!!

There are some common Folders and Files on each CD, so unless you exclude them from the copy, you will have to be at your computer when you get the message that “File XXX already exists – do you want to overwrite it” or something like that.

Once you have copied all the CD’s to you hard drive, you need to Share the DSS Folder and this again takes a loooong time due to the large number of Folders.

After you have Shared the DSS Folder, you then Map it to a Drive Letter e.g. R so it connects at log on.

In CCDSoft (my DSS file viewer) I then point the program to the (shared and mapped) DDS Folder on the R Drive.

Hope that helps!

Somewhere on the Software Bisque website, there is an article on how to do this.

Cheers

Dennis

[Barrykgerdes]

Hi Phil

You are unlucky. I wiped my spare HDD last Monday and it had my spare DSS on it.

Firstly the copy process will take you a long long time. I have done it three times. Each of the CD's need to be copied to the root directory of a Hard disk.

I recomend that you get yourself a USB external HDD. If you copy them to a disk that is formatted Fat32 the full 18 disks use about 14 GB, 4000 folders and 1.2Million files. If you use a partition on your normal HDD you will have trouble with some program, especially virus scans. that like to read all the files all the time. This can take 7 or 8 minutes at times.

Its almost impossible to put a virus on the DSS HDD so you can leave it out of scans. but some scanning programs don't let you do this. If you have the DSS on an outboard HDD it can be disconnected when not required.

Once thr DSS is on the hard disk you will find it works great and worth the effort.

Barry

[Dennis]

Just checked my installation and I’ve got:

1662 Folders with 784 objects in each folder plus 1 Folder (Headers) with 1665 objects giving a total of 1,304,673, plus, 4 Files in the root directory.

Cheers

Dennis

[Phil]

OK so if i get a external HDD how do i make a root directory for the file to be copy to. This sound very hard to do. You think they would make it easier.
Phil

[Barrykgerdes]

Originally Posted by Phil

OK so if i get a external HDD how do i make a root directory for the file to be copy to. This sound very hard to do. You think they would make it easier.
Phil

I bought a WD 80GB usb hard disk from Harvey Norman for $80 because my normal supplier (about $60) was not open. I think the smallest you can buy now is 120 GB.

Plugged it into the high speed USB (my computer told me which one it was)

Partitioned it into 3 FAT32 partitions, 20GB, 30GB and 30GB. I Used Partition Magic but there are others. Then just copied each disc onto the 20GB partition one after the other. Each disc took about 10 mins. I was prompted for the overwriting of the common files and said yes. I watched a DVD on TV while I waited. I use FAT32 because it allows me to examine the disk with DOS 7.0. I tested NTFS but there was no advantage.

I used the other partitions to store a second copy of my back ups and disc images.

After that I ran my already installed DSS program and ran setup from the DSS menu and edited the CD Rom letter to the letter of the new partition.
Worked first go.

Barry

[Dennis]

Originally Posted by Phil

OK so if i get a external HDD how do i make a root directory for the file to be copy to. This sound very hard to do. You think they would make it easier.
Phil

Hi Phil

The copying procedure took me hours and hours and if you install the Folders and Files from the CD’s in the wrong directory, you may have to repeat the whole process.

It sounds like you are a bit uncertain as what to do, so if you have a friend who is more familiar with computers, it might be worth inviting them over and explaining your problem?

Cheers

Dennis

[Phil]

Who do you copy the file to a new hard dics if the CD drive does not see the files. When i put the CD in i see nothing in the drive to copy.
Phil

[Dennis]

From the Software Bisque website:

“The RealSky data was created using 512 byte sectors on the 18 CD-ROMs. This format was chosen to save space because there are literally a million files spread over the 18 CD's, actually 1.3 million files to be exact. When RealSkyView was written by Software Bisque many years ago, to access this data large hard drives were either non existent or cost prohibitive for most at best This of course has now changed for the better.”

I think that the above format seems to take a long time to read? On my computer, it takes a long time for the contents of the CD to display.

Cheers

Dennis

[Barrykgerdes]

Hi Phil

Most CD readers will work if the disc is not damaged. It just takes a long time to load be patient. I just tested a disk and it took over a minute to load.

Barry

[toryglen-boy (Duncan)]

Originally Posted by Barrykgerdes

Hi Phil

Most CD readers will work if the disc is not damaged. It just takes a long time to load be patient. I just tsted a disk and it too over a minute to load.

Barry

Bluray drives on laptops take even longer ...

[Barrykgerdes]

Originally Posted by Dennis

From the Software Bisque website:

“The RealSky data was created using 512 byte sectors on the 18 CD-ROMs. This format was chosen to save space because there are literally a million files spread over the 18 CD's, actually 1.3 million files to be exact. When RealSkyView was written by Software Bisque many years ago, to access this data large hard drives were either non existent or cost prohibitive for most at best This of course has now changed for the better.”

I think that the above format seems to take a long time to read? On my computer, it takes a long time for the contents of the CD to display.

Cheers

Dennis

When RealSky was released years ago. Very few people had more than 20 MB of RAM and most were still running Windows 3.11. Windows 95 had just been released. The maximum size of the view was thus limited.

To use Windows 3.11 you first had to install Bisques' version of Win32. It was quite an exercise to get up and running. There were some sample programs to experiment with on the Win32 platform. One of which was a copy of Freecell. This is the version I still use because it keeps a record of the games played in "entpack.ini" still applicable to XP and Vista. I started at game #1 and have now solved up to #25380 in 10 years. No I can't solve the #11982 but I have solved the rest.

Baz

[toryglen-boy (Duncan)]

Originally Posted by Barrykgerdes

When RealSky was released years ago. Very few people had more than 20 MB of RAM and most were still running Windows 3.11. Windows 95 had just been released. The maximum size of the view was thus limited.

To use Windows 3.11 you first had to install Bisques' version of Win32. It was quite an exercise to get up and running. There were some sample programs to experiment with on the Win32 platform. One of which was a copy of Freecell. This is the version I still use because it keeps a record of the games played in "entpack.ini" still applicable to XP and Vista. I started at game #1 and have now solved up to #25380 in 10 years. No I can't solve the #11982 but I have solved the rest.

Baz

or install DOSBox, create a sessions, and setup Win 3.11 from within there
I have tried this, and it works great.

[Phil]

It must be a vista thing because i was able to run the files on another comp. running XP not vista.
Phil