Author: Copyright (C) 2014 by CiderPress authors

Convert File Archive to Disk Image

With this feature, you can copy part or all of a ShrinkIt file archive to a new ProDOS volume in a single step. When combined with the "convert disk image to file archive" feature, it's possible to resize ProDOS disks, converting 140K floppies to 800K floppies or even 32MB hard drive images.

The images created are always unadorned ProDOS-order (.PO) files. If you need to have it in a different format, you can use the Disk Image Converter to change it.

Open a file archive and highlight the files you want to convert. Items will be converted in the order that they appear, so if you want to leave the order undisturbed make sure you have them sorted in the original order (more information on this). Select "Convert to disk archive..." from the Actions menu.

Choose the size of the disk to create from the set shown. Standard removable media and hard drive sizes are available. If you're not sure how much space the files require, click the "Compute" button. The size requirements will be determined by creating a temporary 32MB volume with the selected files and adjusting for system overhead. Any size options that won't work will be dimmed.

Filenames on ProDOS disks must start with a letter, be composed entirely of letters, numbers, and dots ('.'), and can be at most 15 characters long. Any invalid characters will be stripped, and long filenames will be truncated. CiderPress will try to preserve filename extensions (e.g. ".jpg"), and will make filenames that reduce to the same thing unique. For example, "my&&file" and "my__file" both convert to "myfile", so the first is stored as "myfile" and the second as "myfile1".

ProDOS stores filenames using upper case letters only. A modification added for the benefit of the GS/OS ProDOS FST allows mixed-case names with spaces in them, but the method used to store the case information can confuse older versions of ProDOS 8. The "Allow lower-case ProDOS names" option in Disk Image Preferences lets you tell CiderPress whether to create lower-case names on ProDOS disks. If you're planning to use the disk with a pre-v1.8 version of ProDOS 8, you should not enable the feature, or your files may be inaccessible.

The volume directory on a ProDOS disk holds at most 51 files. If you need to put more than 51 files onto a ProDOS disk, make sure some or all of them are in folders, which do not have a limit.

If you are converting a ShrinkIt archive that contains a disk image, the disk image will be converted as a ProDOS-order (.PO) file.

For performance reasons this feature holds most of the files in memory during the operation, making this somewhat memory-intensive. If you are working with 32MB hard drive partitions, performance on systems with insufficient RAM may suffer.