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1996-11-15
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LAUNDER
Last updated by Roedy Green on 1996 October 25
Introduction
LAUNDER is a diskette laundry. It rapidly launders (erases)
diskettes and disinfects them of all viruses in a second or two.
It brings old diskettes up to the latest DOS 6.0 standards. It
erases all directories, files and volume labels.
LAUNDER lets you rapidly recycle a pile of diskettes. Depending
on your BIOS and brand of diskette drive, it will take between 1
and 6 seconds per diskette.
How To Use It
Just type LAUNDER A: or LAUNDER B: and follow the prompts. That
is all you need to know. LAUNDER by itself is equivalent to
LAUNDER A:. LAUNDER never touches hard disks.
At any time you may hit the Esc key to exit LAUNDER. At any time
you may hit the space bar to prod LAUNDER to look afresh at the
current disk and re-launder it.
As you erase each diskette, LAUNDER tells you what kind it is.
It changes the background colour of the screen so that you can
tell out the corner of your eye. Further it makes a distinctive
tone for each type of diskette.
LAUNDER will warn you with a message and "prang" tone if you have
just laundered a diskette with bad clusters. You can still use
the diskette, since the record of the location of bad clusters
will be preserved. However, for many purposes, such as diskette
duplication, you should only use perfect diskettes.
Colour Code
Type Size Density Format Colour
AT 3½" 1.44 MB High density 18-sector GREEN
AT 5¼" 1.2 MB High density 15-sector RED
XT 3½" 720 KB Double density 9-sector BLUE
XT 5¼" 360 KB Double Density 9-sector YELLOW
XT 5¼" 320 KB ancient Double sided 8-sector VIOLET
XT 5¼" 180 KB ancient Single sided 9-sector VIOLET
XT 5¼" 160 KB ancient Single sided 8-sector VIOLET
VIRGIN unformatted WHITE
NORTON proprietary format PINK
Damaged bad media byte BLACK
Trouble Shooting
LAUNDER is not designed to work on the XT. Further it is not
designed to work with diskette drives that don't have changeline
support i.e. old 360 KB and 720 KB drives. If you try to use it
on such equipment, it will apologize for its ineptitude and
abort. Some AT 1.44 drives such as the Toshiba don't have
standard changeline support. LAUNDER will act as if you were
constantly yanking the diskettes out from under it. LAUNDER will
be unusable on such machines.
Sometimes after using LAUNDER, DOS will complain of an "invalid
disk change". This will occur if you:
a) Use Norton Cache
b) Insert the first diskette before you start LAUNDER rather
than waiting for LAUNDER to prompt you to insert it.
c) Fail to remove the last diskette when LAUNDER asks you to.
d) Use a machine or software with bugs in the BIOS (Use
FBIOS.exe to determine if you have floppy BIOS bugs).
Once the problem has occurred, only REBOOT will clear DOS's pea
brain. To prevent the problem, either avoid Norton Cache, or be
careful about inserting and removing diskettes. The problem is,
Launder works behind DOS's back, using only BIOS. To DOS, a
diskette appears to mysteriously change volume serial number if
you have one inserted at the start and finish.
If you leave LAUNDER unattended more than 20 seconds, it will
turn off the diskette motors, and ask you to hit the SPACE BAR to
restart it. If LAUNDER seems broken, try reading the screen and
pressing the SPACE BAR as requested.
If you have 3 or 4 floppy drives, you must refer to the extra
drives beyond A: and B: by strange names. Use LAUNDER 3: or
LAUNDER 4: rather than LAUNDER F: or LAUNDER G: or whatever DOS
calls them. LAUNDER is too stupid to be able to convert the DOS
names to the BIOS drive numbers it uses internally.
Using Option Switches
Here are some valid examples:
LAUNDER B: /Q /Boot
Here are some invalid examples:
LAUNDER A: quiet <-- missing /
Option Switches
/BootB Lays down a special boot track so that if this
disk is accidentally booted from the A: drive, the
system will reboot, not from C: as normal, but
from the disk in B:. This would allow you for
example to boot a 3.5" DOS disk in a machine with
a 5.25" A: drive. You could use this to install
DOS from B: if you had only the "wrong" size
diskettes. Once you are booted from B:, the A:
and B: drives will be swapped until the next boot.
/Government erases entire surface multiple times to make it
very difficult to recover data, even with special
spy analog equipment. Even with the /Government
option the KGB or CIA could still probably
reconstruct your data. It uses the American
D.O.D. standard 5220.22M. It overwrites the data
first with 0s then with 1s, then with division
marks. Then it verifies the last write. This is
for confidential, not secret data. This takes a
long time because there are 4 complete passes over
the entire disk surface. I don't have a copy of
the D.O.D. standard, so I am sure if I have dotted
my "i" and crossed my "t"s. If you discover it
should be done slightly differently, please let me
know.
/Keep updates floppies with fancy auto-reboot and full
DOS 6.0 disk geometry fields in the boot record,
but leaves data intact -- a fast SCAT, with
warning of bad tracks. Makes old disks work with
new programs. It does not erase the volume label.
There are two copies of the volume label on a
disk, one in the directory and one in the boot
record. If they do not agree, /Keep
resynchronizes them to match the one in the
directory. This means /Keep will automatically
update to the latest standards older floppies that
did not have the second volume label in the boot
record.
/Prompt displays the root directory and waits for keyboard
go-ahead before erasing. /Prompt can also be used
with /Keep so that you might avoid making a
bootable disk unbootable.
/Quiet no sound. Turns off all sound effects so that you
can use LAUNDER without disturbing your
neighbours. You would have to look at the screen
to use LAUNDER in /QUIET mode. Normally you can
run it blind using only the sound effects to guide
you.
/Secure erases entire surface to prevent unerase attempts.
Will foil Norton Unerase and Norton DiskEdit
scavenging, but will not stop the CIA. The normal
LAUNDER process just erases the root directory,
but leaves the file data alone, where it could be
recovered Norton DiskEdit, but not with a simple
UnErase. It takes 40 seconds to erase a 1.2 MB
floppy with /Secure. In contrast, Format takes 70
seconds. Peter Norton's WipeInfo A:/R1 does the
same thing, but it takes 6 minutes and 15 seconds.
How It Works
LAUNDER works by writing a new FAT and null root directory entry.
This way it does not need to erase the files and directories one
at a time.
LAUNDER does NOT write to the data part of the diskette. If you
wanted to ensure that information could never be recovered us