Tool - Windows Volume Copier
Author: Copyright (C) 2014 by CiderPress authors

Windows Volume Copier

This tool lets you copy all or part of a Windows volume to or from a file. This can be used to make images of 3.5" floppy disks, copy disk images onto 3.5" disks, back up a CFFA card, or swap partitions in and out of a hard drive. This can also operate on normal disk image files and block images extracted from devices.

WARNING: it's possible to destroy all data on your hard drive. Make sure you're opening the right volume! When in doubt, open the disk in "read only" mode.

There are two versions of the tool. If you select "Volume copier (open volume)", you will be given a list of volumes to choose from. Select the volume you want to work with. If you check "read only", copying data into the volume will be disallowed. If it's not checked, the volume will be opened with write access enabled. In either case, under Windows 2000 or XP you will need to have administrator privileges to access volumes other than the floppy drive.

If you select "Volume copier (open file)", you can open any disk image of your choosing. This can be a handy way to extract from or modify a multi-partition image file.

CiderPress will try to figure out what format the volume is in, automatically detecting any sub-volumes, such as CFFA partitions and hard drive partitions. If the volume has a single filesystem on it, CiderPress will display the volume name, format, and volume size in blocks and megabytes. If the volume has sub-volumes, you will see one entry for the entire volume (shown with a large green dot) and below it one entry for each sub-volume (with a smaller blue dot).

Click on the volume or sub-volume you want to manipulate. To copy the volume to a file, click on "copy to file". This will create a ProDOS ordered ("xxx.po") disk image that some Apple II emulators will be able to use directly. To copy a file onto the volume, click on "copy from file". This pulls blocks out of the disk image file and writes them to the volume or sub-volume. You can open any disk image format that CiderPress supports.

When copying from a file to a volume, the file must be smaller than the volume. You cannot, for example, copy a 32MB ProDOS volume onto a 1.4MB floppy. If you copy a 1.4MB floppy image onto a 32MB CFFA partition, you will have a 1.4MB ProDOS partition and 30.6MB of wasted space. If you copy a 140K DOS 3.3 image onto a 32MB CFFA partition, you will end up with a useless partition, because nothing will look for a DOS volume there. For safety, CiderPress will not allow you to copy data onto a volume 8GB or larger.

When copying large volumes to disk, CiderPress starts by creating an empty disk image file. For large (512MB+) volumes, this may take several seconds as Windows creates an empty file.

If you are overwriting the first volume of a CFFA image, make sure you're copying ProDOS or HFS in. If CiderPress can't recognize the first partition, it may not be able to detect that the volume is a CFFA card, and will not display the CFFA sub-volumes.

The sizes used are for the entire partition. If you formatted a 32MB ProDOS volume in a 1GB partition on a CFFA card, CiderPress will treat it as a 1GB volume, even though ProDOS is only on the first part of it. Extracting that ProDOS volume may be awkward.

Hard drives with Macintosh-style partioning have explicit filesystem identification for each partition. That is, each partition will be labeled as ProDOS, HFS, a device driver, or whatever is appropriate. CiderPress does not currently have the ability to change these labels. Copying the wrong thing onto a partition, such as putting a ProDOS volume into a partition meant for HFS, could have unexpected results.

Bear in mind that old hard drives are pretty slow by today's standards. A 2GB drive purchased in the mid-1990s will deliver 4-5MB/sec on bulk reads, which means it'll take about 8 minutes to back up the entire drive. These drives tended to have small caches and slow seeks though, so it can take 30 seconds to a minute for the contents of the disk to be loaded, because scanning the list of files requires lots of single-block reads.

If CiderPress encounters errors while reading, it will start doing single-block reads instead of bulk reads. This can be *significantly* slower, on the order of 5-10x for some types of drives. Errors encountered while writing halt copying immediately.