To report errors, suggestions, or whatever, send e-mail to fab@kagi.com.
My Web page is at http://www.kagi.com/authors/fab/
Don’t bother copying the above data out of this document, for there are handier menu items inside my application (see Edit menu).
Disk Charmer™ documentation
The latest version of any program of mine is usually available on the Info-Mac and Umich archives and their mirrors.
This document has styles in it. You may view them with a text editor such as Tex-Edit by Tom Bender or Style (1.2.1 or later) by Marco Piovanelli, or Apple SimpleText by Tom Dowdy and who knows what else.
• FEATURE LIST
Disk Charmer lets you perform the following tasks:
◊ initialize floppy disks
◊ quickly erase any kind of disk, even using foreign formats such as MS-DOS (ugh!); you need Apple's PC Exchange control panel to create non-Mac disks
◊ copy floppy disks
◊ verify floppy disk media
◊ create DiskCopy disk images from floppies
◊ recreate floppies from DiskCopy or DiskDup+ disk images
◊ create disks larger than normal: you gain 9K on 800K disks, 19K on 1.4M disks, 1.5M on Zip disks
Disk Charmer is easy and convenient to use:
◊ it provides Balloon Help™
◊ it performs the job in background; to access this feature, you need the Thread Manager extension from Apple Computer, or System 7.5.x which incorporates it
◊ it supports drag&drop - even the new Drag Manager
• Disk Charmer is still not PowerPC native; why?
For one thing, it mostly uses the File Manager, that currently runs in 68K emulation mode, so running native would actually slow down because of the Mixed Mode switches; for another, preemptive threads are not supported in native mode, so you would lose the backgrounding feature; for yet another, the Make disks larger feature would require an unsupported hack to work in native mode.
• COMPATIBILITY ISSUES
◊ Disk Charmer can only be used under System 7 or later; if you try to start it up under older versions of the System you will get an error message.
◊ System 7.5.5 fixes lots of bugs that may improve Disk Charmer’s behavior on certain Mac models or in certain circumstances. Details are in my web pages and in the System 7.5.5 notes.
◊ If you use Connectix SpeedEmulator you must install version 1.3 or later, since earlier versions are incompatible with Disk Charmer. I have one report of a conflict between SpeedEmulator 1.3 and RAMDoubler 1.6.2 (Disk Charmer would not run correctly with both installed). The issue is still open. Detailed reports wanted.
◊ Apple Menu Options (any version) is astoundingly buggy. Wipe it off your Mac, here and now!
Please note: it does not matter what selections you make in the Apple Menu Options control panel; the problem will persist until the panel is disabled completely by moving it out of the System Folder.
If the evil Apple Menu Options is installed, Disk Charmer may unleash an orgy of hard disk activity even though floppies are all that are being formatted. As soon as the Mac starts the initialization process on the floppy it would also start reading from the hard disk, a process which prevents any other activity from taking place. Then, when the floppy is ejected after the initialization, another hard disk scan may take place. Each of these scans might take a minute or more effectively locking up the Mac during the entire initialization process and a minute after. Apparently the feature which remembers the most recent applications, servers and documents requires a complete read of the hard disk and is triggered somehow by Disk Charmer and Norton Backup (and who knows what else).
There is a host of third party utilities implementing the Hierarchical menus just fine and not causing the hard disk activity which Apple Menu Options does.
◊ On MFS disks Disk Charmer and Finder think the invisible SAM Quickscan File is open, and the disk cannot be charmed, erased, or even ejected. The workaround is turning off SAM for the duration of the erasure (SAM users already tell SAM to ignore Disk Charmer's formatting a volume). SAM is sold by Symantec.
◊ Ontrack Disk Manager Mac 4.0, when installed on IDE drives, is incompatible with Disk Charmer: it makes your Mac hang when erasing or verifying a floppy if the "Can switch among applications..." option is active. The problem may or may not occur with SCSI drives. Use an Apple formatter, a different third party formatter or a later version of the abovementioned formatter.
◊ Do not try ejecting the disk with the Command-shift-number combination while Disk Charmer initializes or verifies the disk and the Thread Manager is installed: the Operating System hangs (not my fault).
◊ Thread Manager 2.0.1 is buggy. Install Thread Manager 2.1, or at least System 7.5 Update 1.0 (a.k.a. System 7.5.1) if you have System 7.5.
◊ Apple/Connectix Mode32 1.2 is incompatible with Thread Manager. Use Mode32 7.5 or later, freely available on most online services, such as the Info-Mac archive and its mirrors:
…/cfg/mode32-75.hqx; 152K
• GENERAL INFO
◊ Disk Charmer sports background formatting, currently when the Thread Manager is present. Thread Manager is part and parcel of System 7.5 or later (upgrading to 7.5.5 is recommended).
◊ Disk Charmer lets you choose whether to look for (and lock out) the bad sectors or not (locking out works only with floppies, currently). This phase is actually made of two parts: the first part runs concurrently with other applications, the second part (starting only if the disk is bad) unfortunately cannot. This is Apple’s fault (again…); it happens (sorry, this is technical jargon) that the _DIZero and _DIXZero system routines may move memory, so I cannot call them at interrupt time.
◊ You can launch Disk Charmer multiple times in a networking environment, as well as from a locked disk (CD-ROMs are welcome; by the way, if this application is included on one it would be nice to send me a complimentary CD).
◊ Disk Charmer is intelligent enough to use temporary memory when it needs to read in a disk, so you do not have to get mad setting its memory partition.
◊ You should notice that Disk Charmer allows switching among applications while operating. This happens because I use “asynchronous” reads and writes from/to the disks. Macs with I/O chips (IIfx, Quadra 800, 900, 950, the Workgroup Servers, the AVs and most PowerMacs) do not slow down while reading the entire disk.
Several users noted that during the initializing process the cursor movement was jerky, and suggested to give up the processor to allow smoother cursor control. The cursor movement is “interrupt-driven”: it does not depend on the processor sharing among applications. It happens that the Disk Driver disables interrupts frequently and for long periods while interacting with the disks. While interrupts are disabled, the processor cannot acknowledge that the cursor has been moved and react accordingly. Again, the Macs with I/O chips do not exhibit this problem, because cursor movement and disk access are handled by separate custom processors, offloading the central one. Unfortunately, even Macs with Sound Chips cannot play sounds smoothly while a disk is being formatted/verified (perhaps AVs and PowerMacs can?).
◊ I wrote Disk Charmer because a friend of mine gave me a tape drive as a present. I put my enormous floppy collection on tapes, then I needed to re-format all of the darned floppies! I was really sick of the modal interface of Disk Charmer 1.x. I wanted a drag & drop eraser with every possible option and a nice, easy to use interface. If you think I have succeeded, send me the fee!
You may have noticed that Disk Charmer is a direct consequence of a “hardware” gift. So, if you really feel compelled, send in good hardware! Perhaps I will be inspired and write another piece of useful software ;-).
◊ Tip: to make a 400K HFS disk, hold down the option key when the catalog is being created. Otherwise, you obtain an old-style MFS disk. MFS, the file system used on the original Macs, is not fully supported under System 7. This tip does not apply to the newest System versions: HFS is always used.
• DISCLAIMER
◊ “No warranties at all, either express or implied…” “All trademarks are held by their respective owners…” and all that stuff.
This application should do no damage, but if it does then you will be on your own. Let me know of any bugs you run into, anyway.
• THANKS TO…
◊ Eric Anderson at Apple, who was very patient and helpful when he had to listen to my bug reports.
◊ Luciano Baesso, whose wide range of Macs allowed more extended testing.
◊ Irene Bensinger, who patiently bears the recalcitrant Igor.
◊ Luca Broglio, whose PowerBook 160 crashed, allowing to fix the bug in version 2.1. He patiently let me Macsbug-ize Disk Charmer on his Mac for a whole morning.
◊ Federico Cavaglià, for patient and impatient beta-testing and a long list of things, too long to be summarized here (he rightfully calls me “the sloppy programmer”). Furthermore, Disk Charmer 2.x exists only because of his gift.
◊ Edoardo Ciotti tested on his lowly Mac SE.
◊ Derek Currie, Jost Jourdan, Horst Prillinger, Shimpei Yamashita reported the bug which happened to be in Thread Manager.
◊ Richard Foley gave important user interface suggestions.
◊ Eric Garneau, who woke the MacUser USA people up from letargy with a letter recommending Disk Charmer in the Nov. 1994 issue.
◊ Stephen Jonke, who suggested the new options in 2.3.
◊ Roberto Leonardi found the awful bug of the wrong alert, and last but not least distributed Disk Charmer on MacDisk Magazine here in Italy.
◊ Alessandro Levi Montalcini, who gave many, many fundamental suggestions about the user interface. Disk Charmer would have been really worse without his help.
◊ Jim Luther for helping, and his great MoreFiles library.
◊ Peter N Lewis & Quinn wrote the superb InternetConfig. (And much more…)
◊ Naoari Miyaishi, Koya Matsuo and the folks at MacUser Japan, who included Disk Charmer on the MacUser Japan CD and kindly sent me a copy of the issue.
◊ Chad Magendanz helped with the DiskCopy format issues.
◊ Rocco Moliterno put up with many phone calls.
◊ Masatsugu Nagata, who untiringly and unabatedly helped during beta testing.
◊ Anna Olmo tested on her Color Classic.
◊ Ingemar Ragnemalm had the good idea of naming new disks differently depending on whether bad sectors are found or not.
◊ Giovanni Rava lent me a couple of useful (read: full of documentation) CDs.
◊ Alberto Ricci, for aesthetical suggestions regarding my icons, and beta testing.
◊ Mirko Richiero gave useful suggestions, too.
◊ Alessandro Rodella suggested the technique that led me towards the “Thread Manager bug” hypothesis. That technique also served as a workaround.
◊ Paolo Sasso tested on his PowerMac 8500 allowing me to correctly implement translucent dragging.
◊ Felix Thomann reviewed Disk Charmer on the Mac Users Switzerland magazine and kindly sent me a copy of the issue.
◊ Giuseppe “Peppino” Ventura suggested the extended disk naming options (normal vs. larger) and tested on his lowly Mac Classic, finding lots of bugs.
◊ Jonas Wallden, one of the first to exploit the Thread Manager in his applications.
◊ Don Ernesto Zucchini, who was the first ever to register Disk Charmer (1.x), back in 1990.
• ENJOY YOURSELF,
and remember that more and more shareware authors are going commercial or worse, going Windoze, because they receive almost nothing. If you don’t pay for good shareware software today, you are likely to pay much more in the future for exactly the same features, plus a nifty package, a good manual, and perhaps a copy protection scheme or a serial number; you know you don’t need the package, or the copy protection, and undoubtedly you will not want to waste your time reading manuals.
