Cream of the Crop 1

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Text File | 1991-04-10 | 18KB | 396 lines

Hard disk utilities: No single type of program makes more demanding use of your hard drive than a large database program like this one. On the hardware side, the hard drive vendors take every possible short cut to push out their products to meet consumer demand. They won't communicate the most basic information to end users about the operating characteristics of their hardware, such as the heat-up/cool-down cycles and voltage spikes that occur with their equipment. In the software end, this operating system seems woefully under-engineered to deal with the realities of high-volume disk access that are typical of large application software. The net result is that our work, your use of my software and my development efforts, become captive to the vicissitudes of the hard drive. These utilities have appeared on a number of bulletin boards and other sources of shareware. In all cases, the respective authors of these utilities assert their right of intellectual ownership of their respective software programs, though they are physically resident on a number of shareware sources, such as bulletin boards or in the catalogs of shareware distributors. Each author of these respective utilities has the same legal rights of ownership as would be found with a journalist or a novelist. Any person who wishes to use any of these utilities would have to enter into an individual license agreement with the author of each respective software program. No such license agreement currently exists between ACS, Juskovitch Corporation, or Paul Sax and any of these authors. These copywrited or trademarked utilities are enclosed here merely as an educational tool, a point of reference, an example of what you should be looking for if you elect to buy this general type of hard drive utility from any of these authors or from another source, such a retail store. Their presence here in no way contravenes, inhibits, or modifies the legal rights or recourse of the individual authors. DDU (Dangerous Disk Utility) provides many uncommon features such as showing the clusters assigned to files, listing allocated, bad and free clusters and more. Syntax: The syntax for DDU depends on the function you wish to perform. More than one function may be requested with a single execution of the program General Syntax: DDU param-1 param-2 param-3 ... param-x Specific Syntax: DDU [d:][path\]filename.extShow clusters assigned to the specified file DDU [d:]/AShow allocated cluster numbers DDU [d:]/BShow bad cluster numbers DDU [d:]/FShow free cluster numbers DDU [d:]cluster/M*Mark specified cluster as bad DDU [d:]cluster/OShow name of file that contains this cluster DDU [d:]/PShow parameters for specified drive DDU [d:]cluster/U*Unmark specified cluster as free DDU [d:]/V*Verify specified disk and mark all bad clusters Note that all options marked with a trailing asterisk (*) rewrite the disk's file allocation table.These options are the ones that may be "dangerous". Requirements: DOS 2.0 or greater. I believe that with a slight change, this could be overcome but I don't have a DOS 1.XX operating system to test with. The problem is that DOS 1 does not support directories or the DOS function call that returns the current directory. Standard disk formats.The program has tables for 160K, 180K, 320K, 360K and 1.2 meg 5.25 inch disks with no boot record.It should be able to support other formats provided with a properly formatted boot record. I have a modified VDISK.SYS device driver installed with which it also works. 25 lines per screen. If you have (for whatever reason) a smaller screen, you may loose information. The best example of this is seen with the /P option which currently displays about 17 lines.) When you use the /V option, you should be prepared for a long wait (10 to 15 minutes) for verifying a hard disk. If all goes well, you should see no messages until DDU finishes verifying the media. If DDU discovers bad sectors in the system area of the disk, (boot sector, FAT sectors or root directory sectors) it will terminate immediately with an error message. If errors are found in the data area of the disk, it will attempt to mark the cluster containing the bad sectors. If the cluster is in use by a file or is already marked as bad or reserved, a message to that effect will be displayed and the program will continue.Otherwise, the offending cluster will be marked bad. DDU: [continued] If any clusters are already marked bad, you will be asked if you want to unmark them before the verify begins. If you enter Y (or y), all bad clusters are freed. If you enter anything else they will be left marked. Here are two examples: A>DDU D:/V 3 marked clusters -- unmark? (Y/N) <N>:N Cluster 2152 is already marked bad Cluster 2153 is already marked bad Cluster 2154 is already marked bad Verify marked 0 clusters bad A>DDU D:/V 3 marked clusters -- unmark? (Y/N) <N>:Y Cluster 2152 has been unmarked (freed) Cluster 2153 has been unmarked (freed) Cluster 2154 has been unmarked (freed) Cluster 2152 has been marked bad Cluster 2153 has been marked bad Cluster 2154 has been marked bad Verify marked 3 clusters bad Note that any drive specification remains in effect until another parameter on the same command line containing a drive spec is supplied. If no drive is specified with the first parameter the current (default) drive will be used. The path specification is not retained from one parameter to the next.If it is not given, it is always assumed that the current directory for that drive is to be used. Be careful! Enjoy! and hopefully find this program useful. DTST - Yet another disk tester v1.0 15-Feb-88 ============================== (C) 1988 Samuel H. Smith DTST is a small utility that is used to check out your hard disks. It has the special ability to report "slow" sectors. These are sectors that read properly, but often require retries. I feel that such sectors are on the verge of failure and should quickly be locked out before they cause any harm. DTST consults your FAT and reports if clusters are already marked bad. You can use another disk utility (such as Norton's NU) to locate any files using the questionable sectors. Copy the files to a safe place and then use "DT" to mark the blocks as "bad". This will prevent real trouble before it happens. Use this at your own risk! I am including source code so you can verify that it has not been hacked. Samuel H. Smith The Tool Shop Revision history ---------------- 15-feb-88 v1.0 Initial coding and release. 21-feb-88 v1.1 Added two optional parameters to specify the first and last sector number to test. 21-may-88 v1.2 Changed scanning direction. Consults boot record for information needed to calculate cluster numbers. 23-may-88 v1.3 Fixed the 'slow sector' message, which was broken in the 21-may version. Also reduced display activity during testing. 16-jun-88 v1.4 The FAT is now loaded to determine clusters which are already marked as bad. Added READ/WRITE test. Initial SourceWare release. 26-jun-88 v1.5 Directed the non-error track by track status messages to the display regardless of where standard output has been redirected. This removes clutter from a logfile if you are running DTST in a batch with output redirected to a file. 17-may-89 v1.6 Added support for DOS 4.0 and partitions over 32meg. Added additional error messages when a disk failure is detected. SST - THE SEEK STOPPER, Version 2.01 Copyright 1986 by Alfred J. Heyman Feel free to copy and share SST with others so long as it is distributed in its unmodified form and as long as no disk copy or duplication fee is charged. The Author reserves the sole right to distribute SST for profit. If you find SST to be useful, And/Or would like to be notified about getting possible future SST enhancements, you can become a registered SST user by Sending $10 to the Author. SST may not be used in a commercial environment without the above mentioned registration. Source code is available. ====== WARNING, RLL Drives ======== Any program like SST should only be used with extreme caution AFTER BACKING UP YOUR DRIVE. But do not attempt to use SST on an RLL-formatted drive. SST does not work with RLL hard drives, only MFM. ---------------------------------------------------------- WHAT IS SST? SST is a program that is designed to reorganize a DOS disk so that it will run "Faster". Normal daily use of a disk will produce a disk with many fragmented files and subdirectories. Simply put, these are files that are not completely contiguous or together, but are spread out all over the disk. These fragmented files and subdirectories slow disk access down because DOS must tell the Disk Head to Seek to other parts of the disk to pick up other parts of the same file. For example, your disk might have three files on it that we will call A,B,and C. Different parts might be arranged as follows.... AAAAAAABBBBBBBBAAAC CCAAABBBB CCC SST would reorganize the three files so that all of their parts would be contiguous.... AAAAAAAAAAAAABBBBBBBBBBBBCCCCCC This change would shorten the amount of time that it takes DOS to read in the file. If a subdirectory is fragmented, fixing it will speed up disk access time even more noticeably! Syntax: SST [d:] [ TEST] [ CLEAR] TEST - will run SST in a READ-ONLY mode. No alterations will be made to the disk. CLEAR - will Clear move all erased entries in all directories to the ends of those directories. __________________________________________________________ SO WHATS SO GREAT ABOUT SST? The main difference between SST and other Disk Optimizing programs is the way that SST achieves the end result. SST was designed to be FAST. SST is also NOT copy-protected and never will be. SST reads in all of the data that it will need during the run session and Keeps this information in memory. Specifically, SST uses DOS Interrupts 25h and 26h to look at the boot track and other parts of the disk. Information about the disks' characteristics are stored there. SST makes a quick comparison of the data it gets here with what DOS thinks about the disk. If these two sets of data agree with each other, SST will read in the disks File Allocation Table, Root Directory and All subdirectories. ALL of this information is kept in memory during the SST session. SST then decides on the best way to reorganize the disk's clusters. When this is finished, the user is prompted (Y or N) to continue or not. A "Y" response to the above question will start the File Cluster Swapping procedure. Here, the actual file data is physically moved. All data is buffered IN MEMORY. When SST is finished SWAPPING, it then updates the File Allocation table on the disk, and all directories. Some disk optimization programs use the slower and safer method of buffering file data to the disk. While this practically eliminates the chances of data losses because of accidents such as power failures, it makes the program run incredibly slow on a nearly full disk. SST DISADVANTAGES: WARNING: It is strongly advised that the user back up his disk before using SST. Since SST buffers all Data, Tables, and Directories to Memory, IF A POWER FAILURE OCCURS WHILE CLUSTER SWAPPING IS IN ACTION... ALL DATA WILL BE LOST. The Same thing goes for ANY interruption during the SWAP procedure. Simply LEAVE SST alone after pressing "Y" when prompted! SST assumes that all disk sectors that are bad are so marked in the File Allocation Table. If you have a Hard disk that causes you problems... I.E. it develops unexpected bad Sectors regularly, Don't use SST on it unless you have verified that the disk is currently OK. One way of doing this is with Peter Norton's DiskTest Program in his Norton Utilities Package. (CopyRight Peter Norton). THE SST USER: SST is intended for Computer users who have the ability to quickly back up their disk and who don't have the time to waste for a simple disk optimization. Other disk optimizers can take many hours to work on a LARGE/FULL disk. SST can usually handle these more quickly. For Example, SST has reorganized a 32 MEG Hard disk on an AT compatible in under 30 minutes. This particular Optimization moved over 20 Meg of data. Zero Bytes were free on the disk. SST LIMITATIONS: SST is designed to run only in a single user, non-multi- tasking system without stay resident programs installed. SST can perform an optimization on almost any standard DOS disk up to 32 Megabytes in size as long as sectors are 512 bytes long. However, it should be noted that SST needs a lot of memory to work with Bigger disks. If SST runs out of memory, a runtime error FF will halt the program. This error typically occurs while SST is reading in the Subdirectories and before anything is moved or changed on the disk. SST's Memory allocation routines will look to see if enough memory is available when the "BIG BYTES" are needed. A lack of memory returns a message along with the Runtime Error FF message. The Smaller Dynamic Memory allocations are not PreChecked. These routines are called many times... (Thousands of times on Hard disks) and it would slow things up a great deal to do a bunch of calculations every time that 16 bytes were needed, especially since SST's Library Routines AUTOMATICALLY check on Stack/Heap memory availability in order to generate this Runtime Error. If SST just can't quite make it to the SWAPPING procedure with the memory that you have, you can do a few things to try and get it to run. Simply do a cold boot without any unneeded device drivers like ANSI.SYS in the system. Temporarily rename your CONFIG.SYS file to something else and boot up without any of the other DOS parameters that you may specify that eat up memory (BUFFERS=##). SST does not use Dos' DISK buffers to move any disk cluster data. Don't run ANY Stay Resident programs before SST. The extra 1 or 2K of free memory gained with these methods has proven to be enough before! MEMORY USAGE SPELLED OUT: SST uses 16 bytes of memory for every used cluster on the disk. This translates to 262k for a completely full 32Meg Hard disk. SST uses 32 bytes of memory for every active directory entry on the disk. One thousand files would use up 32000 bytes of RAM. SST will buffer out one complete copy of the File allocation Table. This would use up another 32K of ram on a 32Meg Hard Drive. The program also needs another 64k for dynamic variables when run on a 32Meg drive..... As you can see, this all adds up very quickly. If you plan to run SST on a 32Meg drive, you will need at LEAST 512K, If you have 640K, you should not have memory problems with SST and a 32 Meg Drive. For smaller drives such as 20 Meg and 10 Meg, The memory requirements are much lower. __________________________________________________________ * DISCLAIMER * The author makes no claims or guarantees about the use misuse, or suitability of SST on a particular computer. It is the users duty to take adequate precautions to prevent and recover from any accidental data loss because of power failure or any other cause.