The Pedigree Resource File (PRF) is a product of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It was first published in the fall of 1999 as a set of compact discs that sold for $5US each. The first five CDs along with a Master Index can also be purchased as a set for $15US. Each CD contains approximately one million names that have been uploaded as GEDCOM files to the LDS www.familysearch.org web site for sharing with others. The PRF has an index on each CD as well as a Master Index that covers each of the CDs published to that point in time that will be updated and published on a periodic basis.
This resource differs from the Ancestral File in that there is no attempt to link the pedigrees that are submitted and notes/sources are maintained with the GEDCOM files. The names and information on living individuals are removed prior to publication. The PRF program was written by Progeny Software - the same company that wrote PAF Companion.
Most CDs will permit a hard disk installation by simply copying the complete CD image into a directory and then running the SETUP program. The PRF does functions when installed in this manner but indicates that the specified drive and directory is no longer a valid CD-ROM drive. Some CDs can be copied to the hard disk and then after installation the registry entry associated with that resource can be edited to point to the new hard drive installation. The PRF does not appear to create or use any registry entries. Still other CDs use a text file that contains the drive letter and/or directory where the data can be found. The PRF uses this "drive mapping" method but will fail to operate correctly unless the drive is a CD drive.
By experimentation I was able to locate the following two text files that are found in the \PRFVIEWER directory after installing the program:
MI.INI - Contains the drive letter to be used by the Master Index
PROGENY.INI - Contains the drive letter to be used by the individual data CDs
I was able to determine that the program supports using a separate drive letter for the index and data CDs but does not appear to support using a different drive letter for each of the different data CDs.
The solution involves installing a commercial software package called "Virtual Drive" by Far Stone Technology (the product is also marketed under the name of "Norton Virtual Drive" by Symantec). The product sells for $34.95US and is currently being given away with the purchase of certain Maxtor Hard Disks (that is how I obtained my copy). There is also a limited functionality 30-day trial copy of the software available at http://www.farstone.com
I am not in any way associated with either Far Stone or Symantec. I would have preferred a solution that did not involve the purchase of a commercial product. Hopefully others will be able to improve upon this solution and perhaps eliminate the need to use Virtual Drive.
The installation of Virtual Drive causes one or more new drive letters to appear under Win 95/98/NT. These new virtual CD-ROM drives are controlled and configured using an application called Virtual Drive Manager. Use the menu item "Setup Number of Virtual Drives" configured with the number "2". The program will prompt you to reboot your machine in order to see the new virtual CD drive. As an artifact of installing Virtual Drive it is possible that your physical CD-ROM drive will have its drive letter altered. Once the desired number of virtual drives have been established it is possible to go into System Properties and alter the drive letter of the physical CD drive to any desired letter.
The two virtual CD-ROM drives created were as follows: one for the Master Index and one for the Data CDs of the PRF. To install a CD simply select "Build VCD File" with the physical CD installed in your drive. The data on your CD is copied to the hard disk and appears as a single file with the extension VCD. It is also possible to compress the data as it is being copied. It takes a little longer when data compression is enabled but the results are worth the wait. I was able to compress each of the CDs to less than half of their original size. The table below shows the original and compressed sizes for each of the first five data CDs.
| CD Description | Data Size | Compressed | Ratio |
| Master Index | 218MB | 187MB | 86% |
| Data CD #1 | 604MB | 223MB | 37% |
| Data CD #2 | 607MB | 163MB | 27% |
| Data CD #3 | 646MB | 245MB | 38% |
| Data CD #4 | 644MB | 240MB | 37% |
| Data CD #5 | 644MB | 241MB | 37% |
| TOTAL | 3.3GB | 1.3GB | 38% |
Each VCD file can be assigned a default drive letter that it will be used with. The Master Index is assigned to the first available Virtual CD drive and the data CDs to the second virtual CD drive. From Windows Explorer I then selected the first virtual CD drive and double clicked on SETUP.EXE. The installation of the Master Index proceeded as expected. I repeated the same process with the first data CD in the second virtual CD drive. Again the installation went as expected.
I switched back to the Virtual Drive Manager application and double clicked on the second PRF CD icon. This causes it to be virtually inserted into the second virtual CD drive. From windows explorer I was able to double click on SETUP.EXE and watch the second data disk be installed. I repeated this process with each of the five data CDs.
At this point the PRF can be used as expected. Each time the program prompts to switch CDs it is necessary to enable the Virtual Drive Manager and double click on the requested CD icon. Switch back to the PRF application and click on OK and the application proceeds as expected. It is unfortunate that it is necessary to keep switching to the Virtual Drive Manager to change CDs but most will agree that it is far better than having to use the physical CDs.
I tried sharing a virtual drive letter on the network but the results were not as expected. The shared drive letter is seen as a hard disk rather than a CD-ROM drive from another networked machine. A workable network solution would be to install a copy of Virtual Drive on each machine and then possibly share the VCD images of each CD from a common server (I haven't yet tried this). Since the VCD image size is relatively small I have opted to load these file locally on each machine. As the size of this collection grows I may decide to go back to a file server approach. I have placed Virtual Drive Manager in the Windows StartUp folder so that it is always running and available for patrons to use.
When I purchased a new Maxtor 27GB drive back in fall of 1999 it came with version 2.0 of Virtual Drive under the Norton (Symantec) name. As of the writing of this installation description the current version of Virtual Drive is version 5.0. Either version seems to work equally well.
I have sent an e-mail request to Farstone Support to see if they can suggest a way to avoid having to switch virtual CDs while using PRF. Perhaps they will have a suggestion that may improve upon this solution. I even tried building a virtual CD-ROM image that was the concatenation of all of the data CDs. Unfortunately the software complained that the image was larger than 650MB (the maximum CD-ROM data size).
I would welcome suggestions and improvements to this method.
Kevin Owen
e-mail: [email protected]