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╔═══════════════════════════════════╗ ║ Disk OrGanizer - Version 1.00 ║ ║ ║ ║ Soft GAMs Software ║ ║ (c) Copyright 1986 ║ ║ ║ ║ Three GAMs Software ║ ║ G. Allen Morris III ║ ║ 1411 10th Avenue ║ ║ Oakland, CA 94606 ║ ╟───────────────────────────────────╢ ║ Mail may be left at ║ ║ Satorie Center ║ ║ FIDO #125/521 (ALLEN MORRIS) ║ ║ (415)647-8528 ║ ╚═══════════════════════════════════╝ TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 BACKGROUND PROGRAMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 LIMITS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 ORGANIZING YOUR DISK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 RUNNING Disk OrGanizer THE FIRST TIME . . . . . . . . . . . 4 ADVANCED FEATURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 COMMANDS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 INTRODUCTION This program was written to help people to speed up disk access, it will be of most help to people that are using large data files or programs that use overlays. What the program does it allow you to de-fragment and order the files and sub-directories on a disk. The program also compresses the directories which will speed up finding files in directories. Depending on the way the data on your disks is being accessed you may or may not notice a large difference in performance. BACKGROUND PROGRAMS You can not have BACKGROUND programs that read or write the disk that you are Organizing. The reason for this is that DiskOrGanizer writes directly to the disk and does not use DOS, so DOS will not know were to read or write data to or from. Which will cause them to read garbage and to write to Clusters that are used by other programs. If writes occur large amounts of data can be lost as the directories can be over written. I am working on ways around this problem, but I have not come up with a good one yet. DATA LOSS In normal operation there should be no data loss, with the exception of write errors that are not detected by MSDOS. This is the same verification that DOS uses to verify data that is Copied. Disk- OrGanizer has as switch that will allow it to run without verifying data and it will run faster if it does not verify the data, But there is a greater chance of data loss. I would suggest that you use the verify on floppy disks. On hard disks it is up to you, I have not had a write error on my hard disk after running it for over a year. POWER FAILURE In a power failure some problems can occur, but they can all be fixed buy running CHKDSK and DiskOrGanizer. If a file is being moved there is only a problem if the power failure occurs between the time that the directory is written and the FAT is written, CHKDSK can recover all of the data as it will be in two places on the disk. To recover from this run 'CHKDSK /f' you will see the following: 1 lost cluster found in 1 chains. Convert lost chains to files (Y/N)? (Answer No) nnnn bytes disk space freed. You will then get the rest of the information from CHKDSK. If Disk OrGanizer was moving a sub-directory then you may also see the message: d:\subdir\sibling Invalid sub-directory entry. This message is generated if the power failure occurred between writing the sub-directory and it's sibling. You may get messages stating that there are more than one invalid sub-directory entries. This is normal as long as they all are sibling of the same parent. There is only one other problem that can occur and that is if the power failure occurs between the time that the first FAT is written and the second FAT is written. If this happens the next time that you run DiskOrGanizer you will see the message: FATs do not compare. (If you have not just run CHKDSK answer No) Would you like to fix FAT2? Answering Yes to this question will write FAT1 into FAT2 and you will be off and running. NOTE: It is always important to run CHKDSK after a power failure to correct any problems that may have occurred wether you were running DiskOrGanizer or not. LIMITS Because the FAT and directories are read into memory there are some limits to there sizes. There must be less than 32000 clusters on the disk. If you have a disk with more than 32000 clusters write me or leave a message on the bulletin board listed below and we can talk about getting you a special version of DiskOrGanizer. There also cannot be more than 2000 files any one directory. Again if you have this problem I can probably modify the program to run on your disk. The only other limit is how much memory your computer has limits the total number of files that can be on the entire disk. Each directory entry takes about 34 bytes so if you have 300k of free memory you will be limited to about 8000 total files before you run out of memory. ORGANIZING YOUR DISK It is hard to say what is the best way to organize a disk as it will be different for each application. But I will try to describe some of the main considerations here. First we need a slight understanding of how MSDOS handles the files on a disk. Opening a file: When a file is opened DOS creates a FILE handle for the file. The number of file handles that can be opened is controlled by the FILES= command in your CONFIG.SYS file. In the FILE handle DOS saves information about were the data is stored on the disk. This involves reading the directory or directories if the file is not in the current directory and the FAT. Reading from a file: When data is read from a file DOS looks at the FILE handle to find the data and then reads the data into one of the buffers that were defined in the BUFFERS= command in the CONFIG.SYS file. If this data is read again it will be read out of this buffer and not off the disk. Writing to a file: When data is written to a file DOS looks to see if the data from the location that it is going to write to is in a buffer, if it is DOS over writes the buffer and then writes the data to the disk. If the data was not already in a buffer DOS will put the data into a buffer and then write it to the disk if this data is then read DOS will get the data from this buffer rather than the disk. Closing a file: When a file that has been written to is closed by DOS uses the data in the FILE handle which was updated by each write to update the directory entry for the file and update the FAT. We can see from this that the FAT and directory is only used when a file is opened or closed. Because of this it is not terribly important to keep the files on the outer tracks (close to the FAT) unless the file is opened and closed often. So what files are opened and closed a lot? Well Batch files are opened and closed between each operation. EXE and COM files that are simple utilities such as ASK.COM are also opened and closed often. Overlay files are also opened and closed often, QMODEM would run faster if it's overlay files were on the outer tracks. Larger EXE and COM files should come after these as they are not opened and closed as often. All of these files almost never change in size and therefore will not become fragmented this also makes them good candidates for being put on the inner tracks of the disk. Many data files are opened once read many times and then closed. Most of the time on these files is spend reading the data and if there are not enough BUFFERS to hold the entire file the disk will have to be read repeatedly. So the location of these files is not very important but it is important that the data in the file is close together. Also if the file is used by a database manager and is indexed by another file we would want both of these files to be close together. In some applications there may be many files that are open at the same time and we would want all of them to be close together. The last type of file I can think of is a data file that is written to often. These files change size and become fragmented. Yet many of these files have the same needs as the previous type. If these files are placed last Disk OrGanizer will be able to de- fragment them faster and therefore they should be placed last on the disk. RUNNING Disk OrGanizer THE FIRST TIME Disk OrGanizer has been tested with MSDOS 2.10 and MSDOS 3.00. It has also been used on disks as big as 20 Megabytes. There is extensive testing done to make sure that the disk can be read and written and that the FAT and that directories are in good repair. It is very unlikely that Disk OrGanizer will hurt the data on your disk, but it is always a good idea to have the data on a hard disk on BACKUP disks or tape and to have a copy of data on floppy disks. If the file ORDER.DOG is not found in the root directory of the disk that you specify Disk Organizer will prompt you for all of the information that it needs. To organize a disk other that the current drive use the command DOG d:, 'd' being the drive letter of the drive you wish to organize. ADVANCED FEATURES There are several ways that Disk OrGanizer can Optimize the data on your disk. They are as follows: Fast Order. This forces all un-fragmented files to stay were they are and then attempts to put fragmented files into free areas that are left. If a fragmented file will not fit into any of the free areas it is then stored in two or more of the free areas. Directory order. This puts the files onto the disk in the order that they are in the directories. You can use the TREE command to get a ruff idea of what this looks like. Packed order. This leaves the files in the same order as it finds them on the disk. It will leave only one area of free disk space at the outer tracks of the disk. Fragmented order. This will put all of the files that are not fragmented on the disk first and will then put the fragmented files on the disk. Using this function will slowly put all of the files that change size on the outer tracks of the disk. You can use this function to get a similar effect to the special order function but it will take several passes over several days. Ok so you want you files to be just so. In order to do this you will need to make a file that lists the files in the order that you want them on the disk. Files need to have there full path names included. Sub-directories are treated as files and not as a wild card pointing to all of the files in the sub-directory. There is also a switch that can be included to tell Disk OrGanizer where to leave free space. The utility DOGMAKE is included to help you make this file. You may also need a text editor that has a non-document mode to sort, delete or add to this file. The default name for this file is "ORDER.DOG" and it should be in the ROOT directory of the disk being worked on, or you can also give Disk OrGanizer the name and path of the file you wish to use. Below is a sample of what this file should look like. [noverify] [fast] ;This tells Disk OrGanizer how to handle ;any unnamed files or sub-directories. [FORCE] \COMMAND.COM ;This fill force COMMAND.COM to remain ;were it is. This command should come ;before any other files are named. This ;command will not be of much use to most ;users. [ENDFORCE] ;This tell DiskOrGanizer that the following ;file should be placed in order. \AUTOEXEC.BAT \PROG1.OVL \PROG2.OVL \SUBDIR_A\PROG1.OVL ;This is different than \PROG1.OVL \SUBDIR_A \SUBDIR_B [HIGH] ;This tell Disk OrGanizer that the rest ;of the files should be placed on the ;inner tracks. \CONFIG.SYS ;This will be the last file on the disk ;and its last cluster will occupy the ;last cluster on the disk. \ORDER.DOG ;You can include this file. \ORDER.BAK ;This will be the third from the last ;file on the disk. As you can see it will take some work to make this file. The DOGMAKE utility can help you make this file. Basically DOGMAKE is a WHEREIS program. The difference is that it outputs the full path name along with the file or sub-directory name. it output goes to the standard output device. So you can either run DOGMAKE *.* and then use your text editor to sort the data or you can run DOGMAKE something like this: DOGMAKE command.com > \order.dog DOGMAKE autoexec.bat >> \order.dog DOGMAKE *.ovl >> \order.dog DOGMAKE SUBDIR* >> \order.dog DOGMAKE CONFIG.SYS >> \order.dog DOGMAKE ORDER.DOG >> \order.dog This would give you a file resembling the ORDER.DOG sample above. After you have gotten ORDER.DOG made you can run Disk OrGanizer. Use the following command: DOG If you want to use a different filename than "\ORDER.DOG" you can use: DOG path\filename.ext COMMANDS DOG [d:] [path\filename.ext] [/FA|/FR|/PA|/DI] [/NV] [FAST] /FA This forces all un-fragmented files to stay were they are and then attempts to put frag- mented files into free areas that are left. If a fragmented file will not fit into any of the free areas it is then stored in two or more of the free areas. [FRAGMENTED] /FR This will put all of the files that are not fragmented on the disk first and will then put the fragmented files on the disk. Using this function will slowly put all of the files that change size on the outer tracks of the disk. You can use this function to get a similar effect to the special order function but it will take several passes over several days. [PACKED] /PA This leaves the files in the same order as it finds them on the disk. It will leave only one area of free disk space at the outer tracks of the disk. [DIRECTORY] /DI This puts the files onto the disk in the order that they are in the directories. You can use the TREE command to get a ruff idea of what this looks like. [NOVERIFY] /NV This tells DiskOrGanizer to turn off the MSDOS verify switch. DiskOrGanizer turns on the verify switch unless told not too. [HIGH] This tells DiskOrganizer to put the rest of the files in ORDER.DOG on the inner tracks of the disk. [FREE nn] This tells DiskOrganizer to leave nn clusters of free space. There must be enough free area on the disk or the command will be ignored. [FORCE] FORCE allows you to keep Disk OrGanizer from doing any work on a particular file or group of files. It must be followed by an ENDFORCE. [ENDFORCE] This tells Disk OrGanizer to stop FORCEing files. INDEX [DIRECTORY] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 [ENDFORCE] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 [FAST] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 [FORCE] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 [FRAGMENTED] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 [FREE nn] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 [HIGH] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 [NOVERIFY] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 [PACKED] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 /DI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 /FA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 /FR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 /NV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 /PA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 BACKGROUND PROGRAMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 DATA LOSS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 DOGMAKE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 DOS I/O Closing a file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Opening a file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Reading from a file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Writing to a file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 LIMITS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 ORDER.DOG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 ORGANIZING YOUR DISK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 POWER FAILURE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 RUNNING Disk OrGanizer THE FIRST TIME . . . . . . . . . . . 4