Programming Portable Drives

[sceadugenga]

I'm a fan of old comics, because as this is a family orientated forum I wont say how I acquire them but the files can be fairly large. For instance the complete set Of Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise comic strips is 2.34gb.

Now I'm not going to get many of these on my current system so the obvious solution is to buy a portable drive, 500gb or 1tb would be perfect.

Now what I'm wondering, a lot of these files are an old format and need special programs to read them, cddisplayx is the one I use.

Now if I have the files on my portable drive and the reading program on my PC or laptop they should open, BUT, if I want to read them on another computer, they won't. Can I get around this by putting the reader on with the comics? Will it have to be transferred to the new PC or will it being on the portable drive work?

Good luck trying to understand this...

[d0ndela]

You will have to install it on every PC that you plug the portable hard drive into.

[sceadugenga]

You will have to install it on every PC that you plug the portable hard drive into.

Many thanks, shouldn't be a problem, it only takes a few seconds to download. I was curious how the drives worked.

[JSixpack]

It depends on whether your reader is portable. You can try copying the installation directory to your portable drive and then running the .exe there from another computer. If it doesn't work, you can make the reader portable one way or the other. There's a forum on the subject here: The Portable Freeware Collection • Index page and instructions on a helpful app here: http://sites.google.com/site/jauntepe/.

[welo]

You should be able to use any given image viewer to display the images inside the Archive files if you unpack them. Of course this is not really convenient but might work as a backup solution.

CDisplay uses Comic Book Archive files, which have the extension .cbr or .cbz and are simply renamed RAR or ZIP files, respectively. The files are archives of individual page images with a new extension for convenience. The standard icon for cbr and cbz extension is a comic balloon. The format was made popular by CDisplay but is now used by many other programs designed for reading comics.

source: CDisplay - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Here is a list of comic readers that support this format with good and short reviews.

List of Comic and Manga Readers - ComicRack User Forum

Seems there is a portable version of CDisplayEx available

Portable Apps

If you like a cute launcher install the portableapps main application to your harddrive.

PortableApps.com - Portable software for USB drives

[Axelg]

Hi,

The files on your portable will need the program installed on every other computer you use...

OR you could convert the files to a more recent format (like PDF) which would make it easier for you to open since most computers should have acrobat reader installed.

Good luck!

[sceadugenga]

Thanks everyone.