So technically, you might say, this is Plan C. Or maybe the beginning of Plan B was in fact the end of Plan A really so this is the beginning of Plan B.

However you want to look at it, this is the situation we are in now.

A5000 has been abandoned. In the intervening 4 days between the previous picture and this one, I have made up an entirely new MDFS expansion box, added a SCSI hard disc, formatted and verified it, partitioned it as 8 "Domesday" partitions, and copied the master directories onto it. If you don't believe me, you can see this whole process here.

I have also written my very own file-copying utility, tailored to the exact needs of this process, called "CHUNKFILE", which you can see in the directory listing from the MDFS above.

Using the MDFS instead of the A5000 running Level 4 presented two problems. The first is that the maximum file size that the MDFS can store is 8MB. DATA1 is 104MB, DATA2 is 40MB and GAZETTEER is 8-and-a-bit MB. So these three files will need to be split up into chunks of not more than 8MB and saved onto the MDFS with the intention of reconstructing them on the A5000 following the copying.

The second problem is that, although the SCSI disc used by the MDFS is a 2GB drive, only 480MB are useable by the MDFS and even then that amount of space is broken down into partition sizes of 60MB. So all the chunks of DATA1, for instance, won't fit in a single MDFS disc partition and there won't be enough space on the whole disc to copy the Community Disc and the National Disc.

Fortunately, I constructed CHUNKFILE specifically to be able to cope with these problems. I hope.