Bila Vrana/BILA_VRANA.iso/008A/LAUND27.ZIP/LAUNDER.TXT

Text File | 1996-11-15 | 16KB | 377 lines

                             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