Disklavier

Morning all

I thought I'd post this warning about new technology as I spent hours yesterday searching for the answer. Last week I took posession of a few more PianoSoft Plus disks from the US. I never use original disks - always a copy and mostly from the hard drive attached to the Disklavier, using YAMPlayer.

The problem - I have recently upgraded my workhorse desktop and no longer have a floppy drive inbuilt; I use a USB floppy which I transfer from PC to Notebook etc. To my horror I found that whilst I could boot from a DOS disk and load dkvcopy from the USB floppy, the program wouldn't recognise the PianoSoft disk in the floppy drive. Looking on Carol's website I came across a few other programs - riparoot for DOS and rootaripper for XP from the command window. Neither program worked with the USB floppy.

Solution - in a friend's office this morning, I used his old XP with in-built floppy drive - and low and behold, immediate sucess with all of the above programs! I appears that the USB drive is not recognised by the operating system even though I can boot from that drive, copy files and so forth. This is quite a worrying thing as most notebooks from about 2000 onwards don't have an inbuilt floppy drive, and most desktop motherboards don't contain a IDE output for floppy drives any more (note that to drive a floppy the IDE output is 32 pins, and IDE hard drives have 40 pin sockets - which are often present beside SATA sockets).

You may not need to copy/backup PianoSoft files very often but be warned you need a floppy drive which runs directly off the motherboard. I'll put in some more research but I don't think there is a simple answer - other than keeping an old legacy sytem.

Cheers
Ken