SOS

BR8 Zip disks can be backed up to PCs...

I have just purchased a Boss BR8 (a pure impulse buy) so I was very interested in your review of this unit [SOS May 2000]. In general this matched my experience of it, which is on the whole favourable. However, there is one area where I think other users would appreciate my input. As your reviewer says, using the disk-copy facility is something you only do once — I copied the demo disk as I wanted to experiment with it and this took countless disk swaps. If I had not been watching a video and having a drink I would have given up! On finishing, I decided there must be an easier way — and there is.

Again as your reviewer notes, Zip disks formatted for a PC cannot be used on the BR8 until they have been reinitialised on the BR8. However, despite the warnings in the manual the reverse is not true: a Zip disk initialised on the BR8 can be read and written to on the PC. I have used this totally successfully to back up BR8 Zip disks onto my PC hard disk and then to copy the same data to other Zip disks and use them on the BR8. The only notes of caution I would make are: firstly, the source and target Zip disk must both have been initialised on the BR8, and secondly, if initialising a Zip disk on the BR8 that has previously been used on the PC, select the 'Physical Format' mode. I am not certain that this is always required, but the only time I had any problem with a copy was when I had not done this. Currently I have only used this process to copy complete disks, rather than individual songs, although on the PC it is possible to see the songs as separate folders. This will probably be my next investigation so if anyone out there has any information on the folder/file structure used, please let me know...

I do not understand why Boss went this route on PC compatibility. Surely the ability to back up and copy on a PC should be a plus, so why make it difficult to do?

Tim Warin
via email

Despite the warning in the Boss BR8 manual, the BR8's Zip disks can be used on a PC Zip drive, and you can back up your song files to a Windows 98 PC and restore them to a Zip disk. The Zip drive reads the disk like any other. Open the disk in Windows Explorer and you'll see all the folders and files; simply copy all of them to a folder on the hard disk (copy everything from a disk at once — consider all of the disk's files a unit). You can then delete the files from the disk, and put the disk back in the BR8. The BR8 will give you a new Song 1 on the disk, and you're ready to go afresh. To restore a song from PC to BR8 disk: initialise the Zip disk in the BR8 (this is necessary — the BR8 formats the disk as DOS 16-bit FAT, and does something of its own to the disk). On the PC, open the disk in Windows Explorer and delete its files (the BR8 puts a blank Song 1 on a disk when it initialises). Then copy all of the files from a previous disk backup onto the Zip disk. The BR will read, recognise, and work with the files just as if they'd never made the trip to and from the PC.

David Stewart
via email

Tuesday 9th February 2010

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