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• SHAREWARE - $10 - CASH ONLY
◊ This program is distributed as Shareware: this means that if you use it regularly you should send $10 (more or less, depending on how much you like this piece of software) to the author at the address above. Since collecting international cheques is VERY expensive, please send CASH ONLY. VERY expensive means that banks charge some $15 to $30. Thus, DO NOT send cheques, please.
◊ I have changed radically the pricing for Disk Charmer. The new Disk Charmer 2.x costs $10; the old Disk Charmer has been lowered to $10. You can register both versions with $20. If you are one of the (few) registered users of Disk Charmer 1.x who paid $20, you are automatically registered to Disk Charmer 2.x.
◊ NOTE: Getting some (usually very few) bucks is what you write shareware for, but getting a note, a postcard or anything else is a lot better than getting nothing. I would like to know how far this program has gone, so remember that you can do something nice even if you do not have a couple of $ to spare.
• THE TALE
Disk Charmer was born in the early 1989, when I started accumulating bad floppies, which could not even be formatted as single-sided. Even WC-DOS computers (I bet you know what I mean) could exclude bad sectors from disks. Nobody else (at that time) had been able to do that on the Mac, so I was tempted to start trying myself. When I succeeded in doing that, I regretted I was not living in the States, so that my utility could be shared by a vast number of users. Worse, I had to leave for the 1-year compulsory military service we have here in Italy, so developing further on Disk Charmer was nearly impossible until the end of 1990. In the meantime the growing Macintosh software market included a number of utilities able to lock out bad sectors. Then (after a while) System 7 came. As you probably know, System 7 automatically locks out bad sectors. So I slightly modified Disk Charmer to accommodate for it, and supplied Balloon Help.
• INSIGHT
Let me now describe in detail how you can use Disk Charmer effectively. As you can see, launching Disk Charmer brings up a modal dialog box. Brand-new floppy disks will be formatted on insertion. You will be warned if you insert a formatted disk. I will not bore you with a description of each single button, because I have thoroughly implemented it using Balloon Help™. Let me tell you the “not-so-obvious”.
First of all, the differences between System ante-7 (Disk Charmer works even under System 4.3) and 7, and its clever adapting behavior.
If you start with a System older than 7.0, Disk Charmer will, by default, follow these steps: format, erase, verify; if verifying fails, it begins testing the disk, keeping track of bad sectors. Under System 7.0 or later, it will do only format and erase, because Apple modified the erasing process by adding verifying and locking out (so that further steps are unnecessary).
My integrity test includes writing and read-verifying onto all the disk surface, and checking for retry errors, too. Most commercial packages do not check for retry errors, nor write. I have experienced that some disks with bad sectors work correctly when read from, but fail when written to. Sometimes they work well in both reading and writing, but “under the hood” retry errors are occurring (so that data loss is in YOUR very near future).
By the way: the progress bar you can see in the main dialog (and beeps on bad sectors) works only while MY tests are running (not Apple’s). So if your Mac is running under System 7 with the default settings, the progress bar remains grayed.
I exclude bad spots by simply telling the system they are busy. Most implementations (of commercial utilities) create invisible files containing the bad sectors. I don’t like these implementations because they waste directory space, and leave behind files that may confuse unexperienced users. They have the advantage, though, that Disk First Aid and all that bunch of utilities checking disk directories do not report errors in the directory structure. The best implementation is the Apple one: it updates correctly the directory without creating a file. Apple disk tests are also very thorough; besides, they exclude the entire track containing the bad sector, while my “locking out” implementation touches only the bad spot, and they mark the disk in a special way as bad, so that applications can check if a disk is a bad one or not. There is one pitfall with Apple’s implementation: it treats errors on the boot blocks as fatal (that is, it tells you “Initialization Failed!”), so that you cannot use the floppy even if you don’t intend to use it as a startup disk.
With Disk Charmer you can even gain a few KBytes of space using the “Larger Disks” setting (precisely, 8.5K on 800K floppies, 18.5K on 1.4M). This is accomplished by reducing directory space. Do not place a lot of files on “Larger Disks”, otherwise the directory will grow, scattered all over your disk. Keep only one or two files on a “Larger Disk” (one Compact Pro or StuffIt archive segment, for instance).
The bug that occurred with the Finder 7 has been fixed. For the techies, I was calling Eject, then Unmount, instead of the right sequence Unmount, then Eject. The right sequence is not clearly stated in Inside Mac IV, so I chose one of the possible two (the wrong one, of course: Murphy’s laws strike again).
Disk Charmer can be launched multiple times in a networking environment.
• DISCLAIMER
“No warranties at all, either express or implied…” “All trademarks are held by their respective owners…” and all that stuff.
• WARRANTIES
There are absolutely no warranties (what did you expect?). This piece of software is quite quite stable (years of refining…) so you can firmly trust it. Again, there are no warranties (either express or implied and so on).
• THANKS TO:
◊ Alessandro Levi Montalcini, who suggested to let the user choose “To beep or not to beep” when a bad sector is encountered. He gave me a lot of suggestions (most of them are not implemented yet, though).
◊ Alberto Ricci, for other suggestions and support.
◊ 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”).
• ENJOY YOURSELF,
and remember that more and more shareware authors are going commercial 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.
To report errors, suggestions, or whatever, send e-mail to simula3@di.unito.it
