FCFS is an image filing system that allows you to read FileCore disc images.
This means that you can 'copy' a whole floppy or hard disc image (ie all the
disc's sectors) to your harddisc and then access it as if it was a directory.
FCFS provides a desktop front end for the (multitasking) creation and
restoration of disc images.
There are two main reasons for copying a FileCore disc into an image file:
- Backing up a hard disc onto another hard disc, FileCore takes about 10 times
longer than reading and writing all the sectors at low level. FCFS does read
the disc at low level during the creation of an image, hence it is much quicker
than a 'plain' FileCore copy operation.
- Maintainers of PD libraries may like to keep all their floppies on hard disc (stored as FCFS images),
so they will easily write them back to floppy but also access their content as if
every single file was directly stored on the hard disc. Again, restoring a whole
image to floppy is much faster than copying its content 'manually'.
FCFS images come in three types, standard, compacted and compressed:
- The standard image has all the sectors on the disc, used and unused, and
if the FCFS image filing system ever becomes write as well as read then it
will only be able to write to this type of disc.
- The compacted image has had all the unused sectors removed from it, making
it smaller.
- The compressed image has had all the unused sectors removed from it and the
remaining sectors compressed using a very fast compression routine.
FCFS is a read-only filing system.
FCFS is SHAREWARE: this means that if you use it for more than 30 days
then you MUST register. For more informations about registering and conditions of
distribution, read the "Conditions of use" section of the !Help file.
You can download the latest version from this page:
FCFS is also available at
HENSA (d148),
although we can't guarantee that they have the very latest version.
Nick has his own FCFS WWW page, have a look at it for more informations about FCFS (including screenshots
and online manual).
If you have any question about FCFS, bug reports, suggestions, etc. you can contact the
authors at fcfs@axis.demon.co.uk.
FCFS 1.10
(Spark archive, 69 Kbytes)
