Opening Media Devices
Devices attached to your computer via USB or a SCSI adapter can be accessed directly. These include CF and SD cards, hard drives, floppy disks, and CD-ROMs that have been formatted for ProDOS, HFS, APM, or other "vintage" formats.
To use the media, you first need to attach it to your computer. (How you do this is beyond the scope of this manual.) This will likely generate a message that says, "You need to format the disk before you can use it. Do you want to format it?" Do not format the disk. Instead, click Cancel. This will likely lead to a second message from the system that says, "The volume does not contain a recognized file system". This is fine; click OK.
Use File > Open Physical Disk to get a list of available devices. "Fixed" devices, such as the hard drives built into the computer, will not be accessible, for safety reasons. Removable media will be listed with its storage capacity. Select the device, and click Open.
The Open Read-Only checkbox determines whether the device is open just for reading, or for both reading and writing.
Once open, you can use the device just like you would a disk image file. Be sure to eject the device from Windows before physically removing it if you have made any changes.
Administrator Access
For most Windows systems, an additional step will be required. You will get a message that says, "CiderPress II is not running as Administrator. Restart?". This happens because, with User Access Control enabled, Windows will not allow low-level block access to disk devices.
Click OK, and then Yes when asked if you want to allow the program to make changes to your computer. (CiderPress II isn't actually trying to make changes to your computer; this is just the standard system warning.)
You can avoid the dialog by running the application as Administrator (though the system may prompt anyway you at launch time). In Windows 10, this can done by right-clicking on CiderPress2.exe and selecting Run as Administrator. If you want it to run as Administrator every time, you can do it with a shortcut: right-click on CiderPress2.exe and pick Create Shortcut, then right-click on the new shortcut, select the Shortcut tab, click Advanced, and check Run as Administrator. Click OK to close the dialog, and then OK again to make the change to the shortcut.
You can tell if the application is running as Administrator by using Help > About and looking at the Runtime line, and checking if it ends with "(Admin)".
Note: Windows restricts drag & drop operations between applications with different levels of privilege. These don't affect most operations, but will prevent you from dragging files in from a Windows Explorer window.