PsL Monthly 1994 January

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U1-04: Disk and Drive Utilities --------------------------- 1553 Disk Copying Utilities Small Programs Disk --------------------------- AJUtil (AJUTIL2) Jones, Alan $? is a set of utilities. Most of the utilities duplicate the functions of utilities already in the library, but a couple of the are interesting. One is DISKDUP that will do fast copying of all types of floppies - 360k, 1.2meg or 3.5" - by creating an image of the disk file on a hard disk and copying repeatedly to the floppy. Another program, DISKEMU, lets the image on the hard disk emulate a floppy disk drive that you can write to, delete from, etc, before making the disk copies. Copydisk (COPYDSK) Harris, Gordon $0 copies volume label, subdirectory structure and all files regardless of attribute type from one disk medium to another. This is similar to DOS's Xcopy, but we had to quit using DOS 4.01's Xcopy when it trashed some of our files, so we are happy to find this utility. In addition, it goes Xcopy one better by copying the volume label, hidden, system, and read-only files and subdirectories. This would allow you to make a bootable 3.5" disk from a bootable 5.25" disk, for example. Not only is this a free program, C source code is included. DM 1.22 Boler, Mark $25 is a complete diskette mastering system for making small numbers of copies of disks. It reads the master disk, including the boot sectors and any subdirectories and their contents, into a disk-image file on your hard disk and makes copies from that file. This is faster than floppy-to-floppy copying, but many additional features are built in as well. DM is not intended for making even small numbers of multiple copies of disks at one sitting. You must individually ask for each copy wanted. Other programs in the library will let you specify the number that you want and optionally will alternate between two drives to speed up copying. A typical ideal application of DM would be for a user group to store its library of disks in image files on a hard disk. DM will display an "inventory" list of available disk images. It will format a floppy (without having to worry about someone formatting the hard disk). It shows information about your diskettes, has a head-cleaning routine built in, and lets you just copy files, as well. Besides being faster than copying from a floppy, it lets you make faster, easier disk copies on a machine with just one drive. Disk Transfer 2.0 (DTRANS) RolySoft $0 is a freeware replacement for DOS' Diskcopy. It copies large disks in one batch using EMS or harddisk as buffer, compares the disks, and formats the target, even in non-standard format such as 1.2MB 3.5", or 360KB 3.5". The program can also make multiple copies from a single master. Dupe 1.23 Best Technology $16 allows you to copy disks faster and easier then with DOS's DISKCOPY. It copies an entire floppy disk, any size, in a single drive, while reading the original only once. It will optionally format/copy only the part of a disk being used. Fastcopy (FASTCOP) Nech, Jim $? speeds up the making of multiple copies of a single disk by alternating drives so that you can be changing disks in one drive while the other drive copies. Naturally, you need enough free RAM to hold the contents of the disk in memory. Multcopy (MULTCOP) makes multiple disk copies from a single disk read. This saves a lot of time over DISKCOPY which must re-read the source for each copy made. On the Disk Drive Utilities disk, we already have a program named Fastcopy that will make multiple copies and does it faster, but it is also a little more cranky, in that it will not copy single-sided disks and it rejects any marginal disks. Qcopy 1.0 Ellis, Duane $0 helps you to make multiple copies of a disk by reading the source disk once and keeping it in memory. It will copy to just one drive or it will alternate on two drives. -------------------------------- END OF SMALL PROGRAMS DISK #1553 -------------------------------- -------------------------- 2673 Disk Copying Utils #2 Small Programs Disk -------------------------- Diskette Image to File Utility 2.51 (DIFU) VitCom Software Research and Development $25 lets you copy disks by creating an exact image of a diskette on your hard disk. Features include PKZIP (#1705) support for image file compression, target disk testing, and more. Disk sizes through 1.44 meg are supported. DUP 5.9 Maclean, R. ASP $25 is a disk duplication utility intended for use by small firms for the creation of distribution disks for their software. Options include format during write, verify write, increment serial numbers during write, read the master disk into an image file for faster copying, data compression to disk storage, multi-disk sequential duplication, an autoloader control, IOCTL support for all operations on 1.2M and 1.44M disks, and a RAM buffer for 360k disk writes. Multiple Disk Compare Service 2.0 (MDC) Burton, Michael ASP $0 lets you compare multiple disk copies to a master copy. OnePass Blanco, M. $0 is a disk copying utility that will make multiple copies with one reading. It will use expanded memory if necessary (and if available); otherwise, it can use a hard disk for temporary storage. It performs a 32-bit CRC integrity check. We have similar utilities already in PsL, but this one has the advantage of no shareware fee. C and Assembler source code is included. PolyCopy 2.60s (PLYCPY) Albanese, Joseph, M. $24 is an easy to use program for making one or more copies of a disk (or disks) with a single pass of the original, regardless of disk density. The program automatically uses hard disk space when copying a disk whose data cannot all fit in DOS RAM. It features automatic configuration, automatic format, multiple copies from one read, and support for 360k, 1.2meg, 720k and 1.44meg floppies. It will also copy bootable disks which normally require a DISKCOPY, and provides support for XMS memory. Requires DOS 3.O or higher, about 200K of free RAM, and a hard disk or RAM disk. SCopy 1.03 (SCOPYDR) Risack, David $20 allows you to make backup copies of many copy-protected disks. Transfer Volume Label 1.0 (TXFRVOL) Micro System Solutions $0 copies the volume label from one drive to another. This would be most useful in batch files when copying from one disk format to another, since DISKCOPY cannot be used and COPY/XCOPY do not transfer the volume label. -------------------------------- END OF SMALL PROGRAMS DISK #2673 -------------------------------- ------------------------------- 12648 Disk Copying Utilities #3 Small Programs Disk ------------------------------- CopyBoot 1.0 (COPYBOO) Gregg, Whit $? will allow you to transfer a bootable disk from any one floppy disk to any other. This is useful in cases where a DISKCOPY cannot be used, such as copying the OS/2 Install Disk from 3.5" to 5.25" disk or to send a bootable disk over a modem. C source included. DF 3.5 Disk Copy Utilities Mark Vitt; $20 creates an image of a floppy on your hard disk for production copying. Also see the next program, Extract. Extract 1.0 Disk Copy Utilities Gilles Vollant; $20 extracts a file from floppy disk images created on hard disk by WinImage, DCF, DF, Sabdu, etc. These programs create floppy disk image files for faster disk duplication, but the contents of image files cannot be accessed normally. ImageCopy 2.1 (ICPY21) Ragan, Patrick M. $0 copies diskette images to hard disk where they can be stored and copied to floppies in any quantity. Polycopy (POLYCOP) Pirard, Andre $? is a high-speed, bulk-copying utility. It can whip out multiple copies of a disk at the rate of 48 seconds each by reading the source disk once and alternating the writing between drives A: and B:. Polycopy works only on highly PC-Compatible machines. For example, it would not run on an XT with a 3rd-party motherboard nor even on a Compaq 286 portable. Be sure to read the documentation before attempting to run the program. (For one thing, the docs tell you how to avoid getting the program prompts in French.) --------------------------------- END OF SMALL PROGRAMS DISK #12648 --------------------------------- ------------------------------ 1364 Disk Formatting Utilities Small Programs Disk ------------------------------ BootThru 1.04 (BT) Gibson, Bill $0 modifies the boot sector of a diskette so that you can boot on a hard disk without having to remove the treated floppy from drive A:. DOES NOT WORK ON A 1.2 MEG DRIVE. CFormat 2.1 Patterson, Chris $10 is a diskette formatting program that allows continuous formatting, formatting without verification, and quick re-formatting of previously formatted diskettes. The program only works with 360K floppies. Note that you must start with a formatted floppy from which the FAT and directory sectors are read into memory for use in formatting the disks. Con-Format 1.8a (CONFMT) Sydex $15 will pop up and format a disk in the background while you run other programs. CONFMT will format 180k/360k, 720k, 1.2meg and 1.44meg diskettes. Other features include support for eight different floppy adapters, adjustable seek speed, and format progress can be displayed. (res:9k) DrivParm Fandrich, Daniel $0 allows you to modify your disk parameters in memory, mainly for formatting disks. Daniel gives as an example where he has set this up to allow formatting a disk with 42 tracks. Users interested in an alternative means of formatting extra tracks should see FORDSK below. Fordsk Tauck, Eric $? is the most powerful floppy disk formatting utility available in the PD/shareware area. In addition to doing fast formatting with or without verification, it will let you specify cluster size and number of directory entries, FAT's, sectors per track, tracks per disk, and hidden sectors. Changing these from the defaults will usually mean that DOS and normal software cannot read the disk. However, if you can program in a low-level language, you will recognize this utility as giving you the power to create a copy-protected disk. While copy-protection of commercial software is generally futile, it could come in handy for your personal data security applications. For example, you could store sensitive data onto disks that other people could not read without your program. Form360 Tellefson, Bob $0 allows for reliable formatting of 360k disks on 1.2 meg drives. Also included in this set by the same author are two utilities - the first will store the image of a 360k disk in a file on your hard disk; the second will write the image back to a 360k floppy for fast mass-copying of disks. FormatQm 1.72 (FORMATQ) Sydex $10 is a mass diskette formatter. It can format a 360k disk in 41 seconds and it supports all standard DOS formats. This release furnishes DOS 4.0-style diskette boot sectors. A unique serial number is generated for each diskette formatted. In addition, it allows you to customize the boot sector. Secondary diskette adapters, such as OmniBridge, are supported. GEM-Cpy Edgerton, Mike $0 is a set of batch files for various copying and formatting tasks. For example, one of these batch files will copy all the files on a high density disk to a group of lower density disks, including the contents of all subdirectories. These batch files require Gem Desktop and DOS 3.3+. HighByte Friedman, Dr. H. S. $0 is an article discussing how to get the most out of different disk formatting options. Intrcpt Zelkovitz, Sanford lets you format cheap standard floppy disks to 720k on an AT's high-capacity drive. Maxi Form 1.7 (MAXI) Herne Data Systems Ltd. ASP $10 lets you put 420k on a 360k disk, 800k on a 720k disk, 1.4meg on a 1.2meg disk or 1.6meg on a 1.44meg disk. It also features support for "360k" disks to 800k in a 1.2meg drive. The formatted disk can be read without any special drivers in most close compatibles and a driver is provided for other machines. We were able to format and read 420k disks in an AST Premium 286 and read them on a Compaq Deskpro 8086 without the driver, but not on an Epson Equity II (8086), which is not a very compatible machine. The disk verify method writes data to a track when verifying it instead of just trying to read it. CHKDSK reports correctly and everything seems to work as advertised. Included with this program is SMax 3.03, the Maxi disk driver. It is used to patch the BIOS disk access routines for some BIOS and DOS versions to allow Maxi enhanced capacity floppy disks to be used. Mouse Format 1.0 (MOUSEF) Magic Software + $19 is a mouse-driven disk formatting utility. You select disk type and drive by clicking on icons. It makes formatting fun and easy. Requires EGA/VGA, a MS compatible mouse, and a 286/386. Qformat Beach, Ted $0 lets you format a disk in drive A: (only) without leaving whatever program you are in. Note that you must have a disk in drive A: to be formatted when you pop up Qformat or your system may lock up. (res:2k) Speedy Disk Formatter (SPEEDY) Pierson, Jacques $? is a Speedy Disk Formatter. It can clean files, subdirectories and volume label off a used disk, like Vernon Buerg's QDR does, but its main claim to fame is that it will format a 720k 3.5" disk without DRIVEPARM or DRIVER.SYS. Since these both slow disk accesses down and do not appear do be needed for anything but formatting, you can significantly speed up your system without them. This also means that your 3.5" drive no longer must be both B: and D: (or whatever). In our tests, a 3.5" floppy took 132 seconds to format with DRIVER.SYS in the system and 100 seconds without DRIVER.SYS and using SDF, so DOS's FORMAT with DRIVER.SYS is 32% slower than SDF. This factor applies to other disk activity too, such as copying files, since the speedup is derived from not having DRIVER.SYS in the system. SDF also works on 360k disks. SDF only formats A: and B:. This means no accidental hard disk wipe-outs, but it also means that if you have two 5.25" floppies as A: and B: and a 3.5" as C:, as we have on a system here, SDF will not format the 3.5" floppy. -------------------------------- END OF SMALL PROGRAMS DISK #1364 -------------------------------- --------------------------------- 2459 Disk Formatting Utilities #2 Small Programs Disk --------------------------------- 800K Jones, Alan D. $? lets you format a regular, inexpensive 5.25" disk to 800k on a 1.2meg drive. We tested in on an AST and it worked fine for copying and working on files. CHKDSK didn't like what was going on, complaining of lost clusters, but when we ignored that and kept working, we had no problems. May not work on some clones without DOS 3.3. 800 II 1.71 (800II) Pasquale, Alberto $0 is a TSR that allows you to use many new floppy formats while preserving total DOS compatibility. It supports the 360K, 400K, 720K, 800K, 1200K, 1360K, 1440K, and 1600K formats. It works with FastBack Plus. Background Diskette Formatter 1.51 (BGFRMAT) E35 Software $15 formats disks in the background while you are doing other tasks. The program can format disk sizes 360k - 1.44meg. It also reports the serial number, number of bad clusters and total size of disks when formatting is finish. DiskID 2.1 Monroe, Gerald A. $? displays and alters the diskette serial number and volume label on floppy disks which have been formatted using FORMAT.COM from DOS 4+ or a compatible disk format program. EZ4MAT 1.1 Cravener, William $0 quickly and easily formats floppy disks on drives A or B in sizes 360K, 720K, 1.2M and 1.44M floppies. A unique feature of this disk formatter is that EZ4MATted disks force the boot process to fall through to your C: drive whenever you happen to leave a disk in drive A: during bootup. You'll never be nagged by that "Non-System disk or disk error" message again. FDFormat 1.6 (FDFORM) Hochstatter, Christoph H. $0 is a disk formatter with many features. It will format disks to beyond their rated capacity, which then requires FDFormat in memory to read the disks. It also purports to use an option that will speed up floppy disk accessing by up to 100%. Our testing did not support the claim, but it is possible that results would be different on other systems. The program comes from Germany and includes a version in German. Source code is also included. FDRead 1.20cj Hazlehurst, Jack, H. Jr. $0 works with utilities that allow you to format disks beyond their rated capacity. Such utilities normally require a TSR to allow you to read/write the disk once formatted. FDRead 1.20cj is a modification of a program by C. Hochstatter that accompanied his FDFormat utility (on disk #2459). The improvements in this version include the ability to load as a TSR or a device driver; protection against multiple loadings; the ability to toggle it on and off; and the ability to work with other similar utilities such as PCShell. Assembler source is included. InIt Kroninger, K. W. $0 is a floppy disk format menu. With this utility, you can select the drive and disk type from the menu instead of trying to remember the sometimes cryptic DOS parameters. No Bells & Whistles Format Filter (NBFORM) Conroy, Steve $5-$10 prevents any drive formatting operations from taking place on any drives specified by the user as being protected. Optionally, you can allow formatting of certain drives, but only with specified format switches (options). Required: DOS 3+ and a drive C:. QDR 4.0c Buerg, Vernon D. $? Do you ever have a disk that you want to re-use, only it has a lot of files, a volume label, and maybe even some subdirectories with more files or, worse yet, more subdirectories? It's almost easier to reformat the disk then to clean out all that junk. Now with QDR, you can wipe such a disk clean much faster than you can reformat it. Another goody from Vern. Optionally, QDR will actually reformat the disk if desired. QForm 1.1 Williams, Dave ASP $15 allows formatting all disk types in standard or non-standard formats. It sets ERRORLEVEL for use in batch files. It is safe to use around hard disks and networks because it will not format a hard disk nor a network floppy drive. ResiForm Unger, Lawrence $? is a resident utility that will let you format disks without leaving the program you are in. This means that even if you were in the middle of doing a backup onto disks and ran out of formatted disk you could call up Resiform and format some more disks then continue backing up. -------------------------------- END OF SMALL PROGRAMS DISK #2459 -------------------------------- DiskDupe 4.08 [DISKDUPE] 09-93 CD Micro System Designs Inc. $84 #7060/1939 is a fast disk duplication program. It will copy 320k, 360k and 1.2m formats on 5.25" disks and 720k and 1.4m on 3.5" disks. DiskDupe will optionally copy a disk to an image file on a hard disk and then make disk copies from it. DiskDupe also offers special support for those who have the AutoLoad compatible machine, and for Unix disks that have an interleave of three. Other features include disk formatting, drive diagnostics, and mouse support. Requires 640k DOS RAM. FormatMaster 5.5 [FM55] New-Ware ASP $30 #7060/1559 (11-93 CD) is a full-featured floppy diskette format utility. Disk verification and the ability to format a 360k floppy to 800k in a 1.2meg drive or to 400k on a 360k drive are included. It also has the the capability of running FMTMAS.EXE from a drive. A DOS block device control format options is available. Other features include a runtime check for SYS.COM and COMMAND.COM location; automatic verification and FAT update following a rapid format of a disk that contained marked bad sectors; and much more. Also on this disk: CopyMaster ($30) is a full-featured file copy utility that makes file and disk copying fast, easy, and effective through the use of the following powerful features: dual directory viewing of files, batch tagging of files for copying, move files across drives, selectable date criteria for copying, selectable file overwrite protection, CRC file copy verification, CRC disk copy verification, file encryption and decryption, fast file search, quick disk copying, repeatable disk copying, two-drive cyclic disk copying, extensive error checking, file-by-file compare option, disk compare on all disk size formats, Lotus-style command menu, and pop-up data-entry windows. Tagged files can be deleted, and a sequential serial number can be added to each disk. 2 and 3 button mouse support is included. Easy Format Falk Data Systems ASP $25 #7060/2370 is a powerful and flexible disk formatter for all common diskette sizes. Easy Format gives you six testing methods, four marking methods, a custom boot message, the ability to turn error checking, the ability to format continuously in two different drives, an option to place a volume label on each disk formatted while still retaining the ability to make the disk bootable with the DOS "SYS" command, a choice of one or two copies of the File Allocation Table, an option to automatically remember all your current settings, a verification program, and a choice of three languages: English, German, or Spanish. The program is fully customizable, and it will not allow you to format your hard disk. This is a very professional looking product in every respect. A DESQview background formatter is also included that in our testing, formatted a disk in the background in about a minute while we were in another DV window doing disk activities on another drive. Info-Base2 Rohrer, James $25 #2828 is a database of technical specs for 865 different types of hard disks. ------------------------- 0663 Disk Drive Utilities Small Programs Disk ------------------------- 0663 On-Screen Disk Activity Indicators --------------------------------------- Adisk.MOD is a cute little patch for the VDISK device driver that comes with DOS. It sets a small propeller to spinning in the corner of the screen whenever there is read/write activity on the RAM disk. Sort of like having a drive light come on. Disklite (DISKLIT) puts a graphics block in the corner of the screen when your disk drives (even hard disks and RAM disks) are active. DriveLED (DRIVLED) Markowski, Tom $5 is a 1k TSR that displays a disk activity indicator in the corner of screen. It works for hard and floppy disks. It is ideal if you have a tower PC which resides under your desk. Iomon Smith, S. H. $0 displays an indicator of disk activity in the top-right corner of your screen. During a Read, Write, Format or Verify, a R,W,F or V, respectively, is displayed. An asterisk indicates other activity. RAM disk activity is not shown, just floppy and hard disk activity. 0663 Disk/Drive Testing ----------------------- CRC_HD & DO_CRC (CRC) RTSoftware $? will create a listing of files (from one up to an entire hard disk) which shows the volume label, path, file directory info and a CRC number. Later on, if you suspect a file has been "clobbered", you can run DO_CRC and verify the result against the master list. CRC-M2 1.13 Kaya, Raymond T. $0 displays both 16- and 32-bit CRC values for selected files. It is useful for comparing contents of archives with external files. It is also useful for comparing files that are physically separated by distance or incompatible hardware. C source is included. CRCfile Cruise, T. J. $0 will verify CRC checksums for a user-selected set of files on any number of disks to determine whether files have been changed or deleted. The 16-bit checksums are maintained in a single text file. The program will work across a complex directory structure of a hard disk. Dfix 1.1 Rumsey, Howard $? This program will search for and lock out bad disk sectors. PC Disk Excerciser 1.03 (DISCEX) Stern, Steven D. $? is used to burn in a disk drive or test for intermittent errors or to force a dying disk to fail. Disk-SPD purports to calculate disk speed indices which are more realistic than other speed-checking utilities. Disktrak 1.2 Wagner, Karl $5 is a resident monitor for all interrupt 13h activities and provides a log in memory for all disk errors. Also it shows a status line at the top of the screen of the activities. The buffer holds approximately 40 errors and then wraps around to the beginning. ErrWas 1.0 Sawada, Dr. Masaaki $10 is a small TSR that remembers the last ten disk errors and tells you what the error was caused by, in case your software only flashes it for a moment, or doesn't display errors when it needs to. Scav23 For DOS versions 2.X and 3.X. Scavenge reads all blocks on the disk, and marks unused bad ones in the FAT so that DOS will not use them later. It will not touch files with bad blocks. Copy the file which contains a bad block to another disk, delete it, then run SCAVENGE again to map out the bad block. Earlier versions of this program marked the wrong blocks. No real harm was done, but no good was done either. It now works as advertised. Verdisk will check each byte of storage area on a formatted disk to verify that the disk has no bad spots on it. 0663 Floppies, General ---------------------- 3flop Sully, Bob $0 tells how to run three floppy drives in an AT-Compatible machine without buying another controller card. This text file specifically deals with running a 1.2MB, 360k and 720k/1.44MB drives in an AST with a standard two-floppy/two-HD Western Digital controller card. However, while three drives can be made available in the same machine, only two are usable in the same session. Align.BAS helps align floppy disk drives. Requires BASIC. ATFloppy 1.31 (ATFLOPY) Steele, David $5 is a TSR that warns you when you try to write to a 360k disk in a 1.2 meg drive, which cannot be done reliably on most machines with 1.2 meg drives. This 2k TSR makes a window pop up when such a write is attempted and gives you the option of writing to the disk or aborting. Boot-B 1.0 Solutions by the Numbers $10 creates a new boot sector for a disk in drive A: which when booted will pass the boot process over to the B: drive. This allows you to run programs (mostly games) that must be booted from the distribution floppy when your drive A: is not the same type as the floppy and drive B: is. (The author can no longer be reached at the address provided in the documentation.) Clean2 Smith, Marty $0 is a drive head cleaner that works on single or double sided or quad density drives without modification and will not accomplish too much on your fixed disk. No harm will come, however, if it is run on your fixed or floppy disk as it uses the PC-DOS absolute sector READ to move the head around the disk. Diskoray test floppy drives. Diskprep Prosise, Jeff $0 lets you convert a non-bootable floppy disk into one with the operating system on it without having to reformat the disk. (on disk #1553) Fastoff PC Magazine $? is a resident utility that causes your floppy drives to stop spinning more quickly after an access. This will only work in an IBM or very close compatible. Flop Housh, Rick $? speeds up floppy disk drives by changing a few bytes in memory (ie: FLOP does not take up any RAM since it is not a resident utility). Hush Handlogen, C. J. $? claims that DOS 3.x has a bug that results in an incorrect disk drive step rate being stored in memory which in turn results in noisy drives. By running HUSH, things are made right again (and quiet). Invis Dr. Debug $? If you have ever locked up your machine and had to reboot, you know that having a disk in drive A: when you want to boot from your hard disk only adds to the aggravation. INVIS-I-DISK fixes your floppies so that they will be "invisible" to the system on bootup without your having to open the drive latch. While it may seem an equal nuisance to have to fix each of your disks, it can be done rather painlessly with a CED synonym to do all the keystrokes. MoreDIR Graham, Keith P. $0 will change the maximum number of directory entries on a 5-1/4 inch floppy. The maximum can be increased to more than 112 or decreased to as low as 32. When a small number of directory entries are reserved the diskette can hold several K more of data. Newdisk is used to check or adjust your diskette drive parameters. This COULD CAUSE DATA LOSS - use a spare diskette. It allows you to adjust step rate, head load time, motor-off delay, bytes per sector and other functions. QuickFlop 2.01 (QUIKFLP) Williams, Dave ASP $0 speeds up the heads on your floppy drive and turns the drive off immediately so you can change floppies without waiting for the drive to slowly quit turning. It is not a TSR and the effect can be reversed at will. We tested it on a picky 486 and it worked fine, so it should work on almost anything. Assembler source code is included. Setdisk 1.0 Radon Software $0 lets you define drive B: to be a 720k drive without using a device driver. Speed (SPEEDPN) Norton, Peter $? adjusts diskette parameters Speedup Ho, Henry $? allows modification of your drives so the disk seek time is much faster and the drive is much quieter. Tandon Welcher, David $? tells you what you need and how to fix Tandon drives. Test Drive 1.4 (TESTDRV) Microsystems Development $0 is a comprehensive floppy disk drive diagnostic tool, if you have the Dysan diagnostic disk. Otherwise, it only tests speed and performs a read-write test. However, the documentation itself is an extensive course in the working of diskettes and disk drives. Tosh144 Greenberg, Steven $0 is a text file containing information on installing a 1.44Mb 3.5 inch floppy drive. 0663 1.2 Meg Drives ------------------- AtSoftab keeps you from writing to a 360k disk in a 1.2 meg drive, which IBM AT's and some clones cannot do reliably. This feature can be turned off if you really want to write to it. See FMT-COPY for how to format a normal 360k disk to 720k on a 1.2 meg drive. -------------------------------- END OF SMALL PROGRAMS DISK #0663 -------------------------------- ------------------------ 1329 Disk Drive Utils #2 Small Programs Disk ------------------------ ATSpeed Graham, Keith P. $0 is a tiny TSR which speeds up AT diskette drive access. Bootlook (BOOTLK) Scott, William C. $0 reads track 0, sector 1 of a selected drive and displays all the technical information about the type of disk. Works on floppies, hard disks, and other media (eg: Bernoulli's). Bootrex 1.2 Orman, Jack A. $0 will read the boot sectors of a disk (hard or floppy) and display the parameters that are kept in the boot record table. CDisk Graham, Keith P. $5 is a resident utility that gives you information about your disk drives. Critter 1.2 TANSTAAFL Software $20 is a TSR that replaces DOS's "abort, retry, ignore" message with a pop-up window that restores the screen when finished processing the error. It also features the ability to log errors encountered to a printer. DiskFlag 3.1 (DISKFLG) Lenz, Stephen C. $20-$30 keeps track of used vs available disk space, and notifies user when space used is more than a user-preset percentage. It supports up to ten drives - hard disk or floppies. It could be placed in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file to check the drives on start-up, or run at any time. It is NOT a TSR. For a TSR that continuously monitors your disk usage, see PAlert on the Patriquin Utilities disks. Diskpix 1.9 Okstein, Charles J. $0 graphically displays the archival status of your hard disk or floppies, including any partitions. The pie charts show the percentage free, archived, and still needing to be backed up. Dpreset Kyle, Jim $0 is rather technical. It overrides a feature of DOS 3.x that normally causes freed-up disk space to not be used until remaining contiguous free space has been used up, which is supposed to reduce file fragmentation, but may have the opposite effect sometimes. Support is provided for DOS 4 and 5. Drive 1.02 Vitt, Mark T. $0 allows you to turn on or off your drives (A through E) and indicates what mode you're in. A drive that is turned off cannot be accessed unless your turn it back on or reboot. DrivePad (DRVPAD) Shenaut, Greg $0 is a dummy device driver which uses up a drive letter. If your system may or may not be hooked up to a network drive, CD-ROM, removeable drive, etc, you know how annoying it is when the letters assigned to those and other drives change depending on what you are using at the time. With this device, you can keep them constant. DrvSwp [DRVSWP] $0 lets you reassign or swap drive letters, as well as write-protect hard drives. DrvSys (DRVSYS.FIX) Switzer, John $0 is a patch to correct a serious bug in DOS 3.30 that makes it unusable for 1.44MB disks. The bug is that DRIVER.SYS does not set up the proper parameters for formatting a 1.44MB disk, and instead uses some parameters from 720KB disks. After installing the patch you should be able to format, read and write to your disks normally. Dskwatch reports disk errors that DOS may retry and overcome. This lets you know that you have a potential problem before it gets critical. FatFix Hotz, Michael A. $0 is a FAT repair utility, for those who are SURE their first File Allocation Table is messed up. It will read the second FAT and let you copy entries back to the first FAT. Do not use this unless you know what you are doing and your hard disk is already trashed anyway. FlashLED 1.01 (FLASHLD) Seagate Technology, Inc. $0 is a TSR that indicates disk drive activity by flashing the keyboard LEDs and, optionally, the system speaker. This is useful on systems in which the system case is on the floor or otherwise out of sight. GCDROM 1.0 Davis, James C. $0 is a generic CDROM driver that supports SCSI controllers. Palert Patraquin, Norm $? monitors a specified disk drive while you use other programs and warns you when the amount of free space falls below a specifed percentage or number of kbytes. Optionally, you can use Palert in a batch file that calls your program and have the batch file not start the program if the disk doesn't have sufficient free space. Scat Green, Roedy $0 cleans up after FastBack Plus. FastBack Plus destroys the BPB (Boot block) of a normal DOS floppy disk. To many programs, such a damaged diskette will masquerade as normal, but to others it will not. If you were to use these disks for normal DOS purposes, you would sooner or later get erratic results possibly losing your files. Scat can also fix disks formatted under old versions of DOS. Assembler source code is included and can be modified to change the message seen if someone tries to boot a non-system disk. Smart Directory 1.1 (SMRTDIR) EZX Publishing $13 generates a dBase file that lists all files on your hard disk or floppy. It also lists file sizes, dates and attributes. (Not on this disk. Ask for disk #8985.) Speedisk Enhancement Tool 6.20 (SDISK) Bowron, Mark E. $15 speeds up the execution of the Speed Disk program in version 5 of Norton Utilities. Systat Garber, Jeff $? when executed from DOS will display on your screen the capactity of each drive and the free space on each. Also if you have placed on each disk an ASCII file with the extension of .NAM, will display the Name you have given the disk and a comment about the disk. TrackPic (TRAKPIC) Opheys, Thomas $10 patches a floppy to replace the "non-system disk" message (that you get when booting up with a non-system disk) with an attractive graphic display. TrackPic stores the graphic in an otherwise unused area of the disk. For example, on a 40-track, 360k disk, TrackPic formats a 41st track and stores the graphic there. This does not affect normal use of the disk in any way. -------------------------------- END OF SMALL PROGRAMS DISK #1329 [25] -------------------------------- ----------------------------- 1150 Disk Emulation and Cache Small Programs Disk ----------------------------- 1150 Disk Cache Software ------------------------ ADCache 1.2 Rifkind, David H. $15 is a TSR, hard-disk cache that uses EMS memory for caching and less than 5k of DOS RAM for the software. It should work on any PC compatible, including PS/2, and will support one or two hard disk drives that use the BIOS INT 13h interface. This is fully DESQview compatible if loaded before DV. Cache2 speeds up disk accessing. Cachstat (CACHSTA) Wright, Jack $? gets disk cache statistics for IBMCACHE program. This program works ONLY with IBM's IBMCACHE program, the one that comes with the PS/2 Models on the Reference diskette. Combi-Disk 0.20 (COMBIDS) Vlasov, Vadim V. $0 lets you set up a RAM disk and disk cache in the same area of extended memory. C source code included. Requires an extended memory manager. Dfacc is a small resident utility that can "accelerate" file access in many programs. DFACC predicts when your program will want to read from a file and reads the data into a buffer before it is asked for. This is the opposite of a "cache" type program. A cache keeps data AFTER it has been used; DFACC gets data BEFORE it is needed. DisCache (DISCACH) WEG Systems $0 keeps commonly accessed disk data in memory so that when such data is read it is copied from memory rather than read from disk. Three types of memory are supported: conventional memory, extended memory, and expanded memory. It will only read hard disks accessible through the BIOS. We tested it on a 40meg drive which is divided into logical drives of 30meg and 10meg; it would not recognize the 10meg (nor a Bernoulli drive) and required rebooting. Otherwise, it worked well. EMC110 Lozier, Frank $? is a disk caching program that uses expanded memory to cache hard disks (not floppies). In recent versions a reduction in the amount of DOS memory used, the ability to resize, disable and uninstall the cache, and caching on both read and write. Emmcache (EMMCACH) is a disk cacheing program for Expanded Memory. Sharepck (SHAREPC) Multisoft Corporation $? is a disk caching program. It will speed up your disk accessing substantially, but it only works in DOS RAM, leaving you 360k of RAM for other applications and TSR's. It is the opinion of your librarians that the heavy use of DOS RAM makes this of limited value for general use, but of possible value for specific applications that may involve heavy disk access. 1150 RAM Disks -------------- Cram Graham, Keith P. $? is a Compressed RAM disk. It takes an existing diskette and compresses it down into a dos file and then this compressed disk can be loaded into memory as a ram disk. Many times a ram disk is used to hold utilities and applications, but is never written to. CRAM is a read only-ram disk. Hramdisk lets you use the memory area between 640k and 704k, normally inaccessible to DOS, for a RAM disk. NJRam Blaszczak, Mike $? is a RAM disk for EMS memory. We continue to recommend the use of such a "device" for storing frequently used files. For example, the desktop utility Homebase (2-UT-861+) takes over 120k of DOS's memory when used normally, but has a disk-swapping mode that is too slow on a hard disk, doesn't save any memory on a conventional RAM disk, but only takes 65k of DOS's memory when you have an EMS RAM disk such as this one. An EMS card can be purchased mail-order with two megabytes of memory for less than $400. A new command line option lets you specify that all EMS memory be used. There is also a special version to write to the Smart-Vu display of PC's Ltd machines. An interesting feature that we haven't mentioned before is that when the RAM disk is accessed, the speaker clicks softly to let you know that some activity is taking place. The clicking can be disabled, but seems like a very good idea. Rdisksav (RDISKSA) is a RAM-disk that installs above video memory and will not be wiped out by a Ctrl-Alt-Del reboot. This is very hardware dependent and may not work on many systems. Assembler source code included. Ram.SYS (RAM) is a RAM-disk-emulator that allows you to adjust the size of the RAM-disk without rebooting the system. Setvdisk lets you set the size RAM disk you during bootup. Put SETVDISK.SYS plus VDISK.SYS from DOS 3.1 in your root directory. In your CONFIG.SYS file, insert the line: DEVICE=SETVDISK.SYS. When booting, you will get a prompt asking how much ram to allocate to the ramdisk. -------------------------------- END OF SMALL PROGRAMS DISK #1150 -------------------------------- QuickCache II P. R. Glassel & Assoc. $25 #7345/1735 [2 disks] is a disk caching program. It provides both read-ahead and write-buffering facilities that significantly reduces the number of physical accesses that must be made to the drive. Typical speed increase vary from 4x on a 55ms hard disk to 14x on a floppy. The 10k of memory for the system does not include cache memory, but extended or expanded memory may be used for that. You can also Lock Down disk directory sectors, which insures that they will always be available in cache. This can increase your disk throughput significantly for some applications. (res:10k) A Reader in Santa Ana, CA writes: "The READ.ME file indicates that there should be an INSTALL.EXE on 1735 as well as two documentation files. All three files are missing. They just aren't there. Shouldn't they be there? What should I do to get two complete disks?" First the INSTALL.EXE must be extracted from QC1.ARC. When running INSTALL, it gives you the option of decompressing the documentation files. All the files needed are on the disks. AdjRAM Cramblitt, Gary $? #7345/697 lets you set up and change the size of a RAM disk without rebooting and without losing data on the RAM disk when the size is changed. It also may work with expanded memory, though it has not been thoroughly tested. The 'C' source code is also included on the disk. Michael Fuerst says "I think you should remove ADJRAM from the library. When activated, it automatically sets a RAM-disk of 64k and you cannot ever decrease its size below this, and it can only be adjusted up or down in 32k increments. The RAM-disk program [on disk 1-UT-663] activates to 0k and can be adjusted to any size." Josh Cockey of Dahlgren, VA rebuts: "I agree that RAM.SYS/SETRAM is perhaps easier and simpler to use, but it is limited to only 32 directory entries while ADJRAM allows 128 entries and also can be used in expanded RAM. There is justification for keeping both in the library." CopyQm 3.02 Sydex $15 #4767 will format, copy, and verify multiple diskettes from a single master. It will handle all standard DOS formats including 3.5-inch 1.44 meg disks. It has the ability to store a disk in a "disk image file" on a hard disk and make copies from it. CopyQM will optionally format all or part of a disk while copying if needed. It supports secondary diskette adapters such as the OmniBridge and the CompatiCard. It also allows a mix of fomatted and unformatted target diskettes to be used. FDFormat 1.8 [FDFORM] Hochstatter, Christoph H. $0 #4218 (12-93 CD) is a disk formatter with many features. It allows you to do a format without erasing the disk, force only BIOS calls to be used when switching drive mode, and adds an 8088-Version of FDRead, support for volume serial number and more. ]]]]]