Quote:
Originally Posted by clh333
Thank you for the suggestion. Reading the DMS documentation it states that in EXTREME circumstances this option may be needed: "Generally you will rarely if ever need to use this option." So I omitted it. Guess I have to start over.  |
The problem with
not using the NOZERO option, is that DMS doesn't archive the entire disk. It leaves out those sectors which it thinks are unused. But those sectors could contain important data. (Example: a program/demo which writes data to the disk but does not mark those sectors as used in the disk's bitmap. Or a disk which contains deleted files. Those won't be recoverable if you don't specify NOZERO.) So it's safest to always use NOZERO.
Quote:
Originally Posted by clh333
Does the NOZERO option still apply the default "BEST" compression, or will the resulting archive be 880k+ in length? In other words: Is there another flag I should also set as a "best practice"?
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Specifying best compression (which is the default) tells DMS to use whichever compression it thinks is suitable, given the amount of free memory. I guess HEAVY2 would give the best compression ratio, which DMS would use anyway, if there's enough memory free?
Personally I'm not a big fan of DMS but it is widely used in Amiga-land. [Reason being, there's a bug in DMS which for a small percentage of disks means the created .DMS file is corrupt. Or at least, it won't unpack properly. But you only find that out after trying to write the .DMS file back to a floppy disk. DMS TEST doesn't show the problem.]
Regarding floppy drives, you could try cleaning the drive heads. Hopefully cleaning disks/kits are still available somewhere.
I don't know how full your hard disk is, but you could create a boot floppy which passes control to the hard disk. After booting from that you could remove the disk from DF0: which would free up that drive for reading disks.