Newbie here, at least in this decade, to the IIGS. I have several GS's and 5.25 and 3.5" drives. I also have tons of software including several versions of CopyII+. Is there an easy way to transfer the 5.25 floppies to 3.5 disks that will then be self-booting? How about also transferring then to a hard drive?
Thanks for any help you can give!
hmm a few questions for you:
1. on the 5.25 disks are they dos 3.3 or prodos programs?
2. are they files or complete software disks?
3. copy protection on any of the 5.25 disks?
remember 5.25 is 140k while the 3.5 disk is 800k. Are you thinking to use it as mass storage? If so, I would recommend CFFA3000, hard drive, or UNIDISk hardware application.
Short answer - "no." The longer answer is - "maybe." DOS 3.3 disks are self-bootable, and contain the operating system including the smarts to operate the drive - and ONLY the 5.25" drive. There isn't a way to make a 3.5" disk natively boot the DOS 3.3 that is on a 5.25" disk. There are a few DOS variants that treat a 3.5" disk as two smaller disk, but they aren't compatible with much else and aren't really what you're after. There is also DOS.MASTER, which runs under ProDOS and can place multiple normally-sized DOS "volumes" on larger media. Again, not quite what you're after. If you're talking about pure ProDOS - then sure, just copy individual files over (including PRODOS and BASIC.SYSTEM) and you've got a bootable disk.
Same story here... with ProDOS, just copy files using whatever file copy program you find convenient. With DOS, you're back to the problem in question #1... you can't install DOS on a hard drive natively; only under the auspices of the likes of DOS.MASTER.
So it seems that you're barking up the wrong tree - software that started out life on a 5.25" disk is best suited to that media. It is a difficult, or at least non-standard path to travel (unless you're talking about ProDOS).
I hope that Mr. Schmidt won't mind if I expand upon what he said for DOS 3.3 disks.
Most but not all DOS 3.3 disks are self-booting. A small number of DOS 3.3 disks were formatted with no DOS in tracks 0-2, giving 2 extra tracks for storage. The design of the catalog data structure meant that track 0 could never be used to store data.
single load DOS 3.3 applications might work. most applications however are multi-load copy protected and has their own disk access routines that just won't work with anything other than 5.25" disk hardware. cracked version(s) of the said applications still won't work unless the cracker specifically rewrite the routines to work with 3.5" disk hardware (which very few bothered.)
so to (grossly) generalize, no. most applications won't work.
To Mr. Fix:
The things I want to copy are complete games, so I assume they are DOS 3.3.
I doubt if they have copy protection.
Thanks!
If the larger bunch are games - i doubt the most are without copyprotection......
There is a modified version of Dos 3.3 for 800k disks called, "Amdos". It partitions the 3.5" disk into two partitions of 400k. About 18 years ago I copied all the files from both sides of the game, "Desdiny" and it worked flawlessly. The only hard part was using a sector editor to make the game say something like, "put the disk back" instead of "Flip the disk." You can't flip a 3.5" disk.
I believe the program and docs are on Asimov. I think this documentation file is talking about what I used:
ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/documentation/misc/AmDOS_docs.txt