The Complete New Yorker magazine on 8 DVDs => now on the hard drive
source: https://www.ebay.com/itm/126627874385
The Complete New Yorker book / DVDs was a wonderful Christmas present I received from my Dad - can't remember when, probably 2005 ? I had (and still use for printing) an Acer laptop with a 40 gigabyte hard drive and Windows XP. It was really neat being able to read the John Hersey issue with his book: Hiroshima (the people in Hiroshima would comment on B-san (Mr. B) when they saw B-29 flights overhead). Or being able to read a bunch of the Salinger stories, even one with Holden Caufield before Catcher in the Rye was released - also the ones about the Glass family. And of course one of the greatest stories: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber.
I wanted to look at the original of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, the text is online but not the original. So since I have this new laptop I decided to install The Complete New Yorker - which works fine with Windows 11. However it is a hassle to load and unload the DVDs - also, with the way the laptop DVD drives grip the center hole, I was worried about the longevity of the DVDs. So I searched and found this site with a nice explanation of how to transfer the DVDs to hard drive:
https://gerikson.com/blog/books/CNY-on-hard-drive.html
I used this program to edit the .db database file:
https://sqlitebrowser.org/
That was pretty easy and fast, basically just changing over 4000 disk entries to a 9. The only thing I had to do was to move the .db file to a different location (I moved it to Downloads) otherwise Windows 11 wouldn't allow a save.
But one big problem: it didn't work ! The program kept asking me to insert disk 1 (I started by copying DVD number 1 issues only, just to try it)
I did verify the .db file edit, yes the disk numbers were all changed to 9 (hard disk). I also tried moving and deleting the backups in case they were being accessed first, no help. I tried moving the .db file to Downloads again, no help. I then tried power cycling the computer, no help. I finally moved the .db file to a USB drive, deleting it - no help !
I was just about to give up when I thought: "is the file cached somewhere ?" I then did a search on the C drive (which takes a while) for all .db files, finally found the cached file:
 |
| there it is in blue at the bottom |
So it was pretty easy to delete that file and boom: it worked ! No more DVD swapping is required. I think the problem was that I used the viewer program after installing it - this created the cached file: thanks Windows 11 ! I should have followed the instructions by installing it and then doing the .db edit before trying the viewer program.
From then on it was just a matter of copying all the issue djvu files from the 7 other DVDs onto the hard drive. Now it works great ! Lots to read when the weather turns bad.
Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm
