Software Bisque Knowledge Base Article – 286

COPYING REALSKY CD-ROMS TO HARD DISK

ISSUE

Can the RealSky CD-ROMs be copied to and accessed from a hard drive instead of the CD-ROM drive?

RESOLUTION

RealSkyView is not designed to read the CD-ROMs from a fixed drive.

However, as a work around, manually copying all files to the root folder of a fixed drive, then using this
drive letter as the CD-ROM drive under DSS Setup, allows this to be accomplished.

Partitioning a Hard Disk to copy the RealSky CD-ROMs Issues

Windows 95/98/Me

Software Bisque has not found a method of properly partitioning a hard disk under Windows 95/98/Me. The entire disk should be formatted using the smallest sector size (512 byte sectors, if possible), then the contents of 1-18 CD-ROMs copied to the root of hard disk drive:

-Root folder of Hard Drive

-Headers

-S001

-S002

-Snnn through

-XXnnn

Windows
NT/2000

Partitioning a hard disk is simple under Windows NT or Windows 2000. Use the Disk Administrator tools to
create a partition formatted with 512 byte sectors. (Windows NT/2000 allow the sector size to be formatted disk to be specified) 

RealSky Files: Hard Disk Sector Size
and File Size Issues

The hard disk space required to hold the RealSky CD-ROM files depends upon the format of the disk drive
(whether the drive has 512, 1024, 2048 or larger sectors).

Say, for example, a hard drive is formatted so that the minimum sector size is 1024 bytes. This means that
the minimum disk space that a given file occupies is 1024 bytes. So, to store 1,000 files that are 1 byte in size (basically 1,000 bytes of “disk space”) would occupy 1,024,000 bytes (1 MB). This same overhead applies to the RealSky data on your hard drive.

There are over million of thousands of small files (files that occupy less than 1024 bytes) on the RealSky CD-ROMs. In order to minimize the CD-ROM space required to hold these files, the Space Telescope Science Institute used 512 byte sector formatting on the CD-ROMS. If each 512-sector RealSky CD-ROM holds 650 MB, the total RealSky data is about 12 GB (11.7 GB). Using a 1024-sector formatted hard drive, the RealSky CD-ROMs require approximately 23 GB. A 2048-sector formatted hard drive requires approximately 45 GB.

APPLIES TO

Installation

KEYWORDS

SBKB

This article was formerly published under the identifier Q549KB in Software Bisque’s prior knowledge base.

Last Reviewed: 12/06/2004