Elektor Electronics Year Volume CD-ROMs on Hard Disk

Published:2011/7/28 2:07:00 Author:Phyllis From:SeekIC

Faster & comprehensive access

By Harry Baggen

The Elektor Electronics 2003 CD-ROM has a useful extra for even easier use of several earlier volumes people may already have. It is now possible to copy most of our year volume CD-ROMs to hard disk using the program Diskmirror supplied. With a few tricks, you can even do so using relatively little hard disk space.

Elektor Electronics year volume CD-ROMs have been around for almost ten years and form a handy and compact way of archiving and searching thousands of Elektor Electronics articles. So far, these CDs had just one disadvantage: discs had to be physically exchanged if you wanted to look in a different year volume. Without special tools it was not possible to copy the contents of a year volume CD-ROM to hard disk and run it from there. This problem has been solved once and for all with the release of the volume-2003 CD. The program Diskmirror found on this CD now allows you to copy (nearly) all CDs from the series to hard disk and access them there. One restriction exists regarding the CDs for year volumes 1995 and 1996, these having been produced using a proprietary data format which is incompatible with the current standard (i.e., Adobe Acrobat Reader). Although the 1995 and 1996 CDs may also be copied to hard disk, the relevant archives need to be opened using their own browser program.

Year volumes from 1997 through 2003 together occupy about 3 Gbytes of hard disk space. Although that is peanuts in view of today’s hard disk capacities (which are often in excess of 100 Gbytes), we can well imagine that the sheer magnitude of the collected archive is a bit too much for many older PCs sporting, say, a 20-Gigabyte hard disk. Since all year volume CDs produced by us contain all editorial articles in four languages (after all, we are an international publication), it is possible to select just one language when copying the 1998 through 2003 CDs to hard disk.

First, create individual folders on the hard disk for every CD-ROM from 1998 onwards, using folder names like Elek_98, Elek_99, Elek_00, etc. These year-volume folders may be contained in a larger folder named, for example, ’EE_Volumes’. Next, create a sub-folder named Articles’ in each of these year volume folders. Copy the program ’easetup.exe’ found on each year volume CD-ROM into the associated year volume folder. Then copy the folder ’E’ (English) from the year volume CD-ROM to the folder Articles’ on the hard disk. On the CD, the folder "E" containing all English-language articles may be found in the folder Articles’. Using the above method of selective copying the total size of the Elektor Electronics Archive 1997-2003 is limited to about 1.1 Gbytes. Having copied all files and folders to their final destinations on the hard disk, Diskmirror needs to be informed about the whereabouts of the various year volumes. This is done by entering the relevant paths on the hard disk.

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