Digger to Hard Drive 249

CasBar

Setting up Victorian Genealogy CDs on your hard drive

This posting in no way relieves you of the need to observe the rules of copyright.

The note covers CDs produced by Macbeth GS and the State of Victoria. For simplicity, the CD periods are identified as (with HD space requirement):

Pioneer 1836-1888 known as VicP (564Mb) Federation 1889-1901 known as VicFed (149Mb) Edwardian 1902-1913 known as VicEdw (149Mb) Great War 1914-1920 known as VicGW (93Mb) rests 1921-1985 known as VicD (600Mb)

The operating software, Digger, and its supporting files are about 3.5Mb. For a total of about 1.5Gb on your hard drive, you can have it all just a click away.

There is also a "marine" CD, which includes an updated version of the Digger software to show copies of orignal entries. I've not found any use for it so haven't tested it out. Nor have I experimented with having two different periods open at the same time (I believe this is a later feature of Digger.) See also the note below about window sizes and locations.

There seem to be 4 versions of Digger - I can identify the original (dated 26 Sep 1997) on VicFed, VicEdw, and VicGW, the second (dated 27 Aug 1998) on VicD, the third (dated 5 Jan 1999) on VicP and the most recent (dated 2 Oct 2002) on the marine CD. If you can, start with one of the last 2, for reasons I will cover later. If you do Help-About, you will be told there is only one version (3.0.5)!

The main operating stuff lives in a folder named Digger. Data for each period lives in its own folder, as you will see.

For demo, I will use terms that relate to the Edwardian disk (VicEdw), but simply subsbreastute your own as appropriate. I am buttuming you don't have Digger installed. However, if you do, go down to the second block of instructions, or (deep breath) delete the Digger folder and start over.

Starting fresh...

1. Insert a CD. They don't have autorun, so "explore" the directory on the CD and run SETUP.EXE. Work through this as you would normally. Leave the CD in the drive. 2. On your C: drive, make a new folder - name it VicEdw. 3. From the CD, open the folder named DATA and drag the files in it to C:-VicEdw (9 files in this case) 4. Go to the Digger folder on your C: drive. Find the file named VICEDW.INI and open it in WordPad-NotePad 5. Make sure the last 3 lines look like this, then save the amended file:

Paths DBPath=c:-vicedw MsgPath=c:-vicedw

6. Make a desktop icon to make it all work (there is probably one from the setup process). Right click on it and check its properties. The "target" should be C:-digger-digger.exe VICEDW 7. Remove the CD, and check that it works!

Adding more...

That was the easy bit. Maybe you want to add another. This time, I'll use the Federation disk as my example. You don't need to run SETUP this time.

1. On your Federation CD, open the folder named Digger and copy-drag ALL files that start with VICFED to C:-Digger (4 files in this case). 2. On your C: drive, make a new folder - name it VicFed 3. From the CD, open the folder named DATA and drag the contents to C:-VicFed (9 files in this case) 4. Go to the Digger folder on your C: drive. Find the file named VICFED.INI and open it in WordPad-NotePad 5. Make sure the last 3 lines look like this (because you haven't "installed" this CD, you will have to add all of this yourself):

Paths DBPath=c:-vicfed MsgPath=c:-vicfed

...then save it.

6. Go to your desktop and copy the icon from item 6 above. Paste it back onto the desktop, and rename it. Alter the "target" to be C:-digger-digger.exe VICFED

Repeat as often as required, changing details to suit.

One last thing. I like to keep my Digger windows to one side of the screen as I work. As far as I can tell, earlier versions do not remember window sizes, so you have to resize each time you open a Digger file. A nuisance, but as mentioned above, install the latest you have as the original install.

To make the Help files run, go to any CD, find the folder named Digger, then the one in that named WinSys. Open the folder, and drag the 4 files (they all start with HDK) to C:-WINDOWS.

One day I'll get unlazy and write an automation script, but until then...

Paul Blair