Using A Single Floppy Disk Drive; Using A Hard Disk Drive - Epson Equity III User Manual

To unwrite-protect a 3%inch diskette, move the switch up toward the
center of the diskette so the hole is covered.

Using a Single Floppy Disk Drive

An operating system expects the computer to have at least two physical
disk drives, and it displays prompts and messages accordingly. If your system
has a single floppy disk drive, MS-DOS treats your single drive like two
logical drives. This helps you perform operations that normally require two
floppy disk drives.
For example, if you give a command to copy from one drive to another,
MS-DOS copies from the first diskette you place in the drive to the com-
puter's memory. Then MS-DOS prompts you to insert another diskette and
copies from memory to the diskette you place in the drive. When copying is
complete, you see a prompt to insert the original diskette.
Because you may swap diskettes this way often, it is easy to forget which
diskette is which. One way to avoid accidentally losing data is to hold the
diskette for one drive in your left hand and the diskette for the other in your
right. You can also write-protect your source diskette. For more information
on using one floppy disk drive with MS-DOS, see your MS-DOS manual.

Using a Hard Disk Drive

The internal hard disk for the Equity III+ has a capacity of 40 mega-
bytes-about 40 million characters. This is equivalent to approximately 120
double-density floppy disks. Using a hard disk reduces the number of floppy
disks you need and eliminates much of the disk-swapping you do when you
use floppy disks. You can do almost all of your work on the hard disk and
copy your files to floppy disks as needed (to make backups, for example).
While the hard disk is very reliable, it is essential to back up all your hard
disk files on floppy disks in case you lose some data accidentally, Use the
MS-DOS BACKUP program to back up your hard disk files.
Although it has a lot of storage space, keep only files you use regularly on
the hard disk, to ensure you always have plenty of space available. Store
your other files on floppy disks.
Before you can use the Epson internal hard disk, you must do the follow-
ing things to prepare it:
Use the Setup program on your diagnostics diskette to prepare your
l
system for using a hard disk, and then use the Format Hard Disk pro-
gram to format the hard disk.
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