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1993-04-08
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MSCON - Mass Storage CONfiguration display utility
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Written by: David William Nixon
Queen City Software
Route 3, Box 495
Cumberland, Maryland 21502
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Current release: Level 6.0 - Thursday, April 8, 1993
Originally released into the public domain on February 16, 1990
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Syntax: MSCON [/F][/P][/?]
Where: /F = include Floppy drives in the scan
/P = Print the output to the PRN device
/? = display this help summary
*** SPECIAL NEW RELEASE *** MS-DOS 6.0 DoubleSpace COMPATIBLE! ***
How many of you out there work with big fat hard disks which are partitioned
into multiple logical drives? Or, how many of you work with a system with
multiple physical and/or logical drives? I do, and doing a CHKDSK on all of
them to find freespace to put new programs is a nuisance. So, I wrote this
handy little ditty to compute freespace, used space, and percentages and
display them NEATLY and COLORFULLY READABLE in tabular form.
All contiguous logical drives above and including C: are checked. If there
is a gap, e.g. C:, D:, G:, it may stop after D: and not recognize further
drives. Or, if you are using some weird controller, screwball driver, or
other kludge to get around the old DOS 32 meg drive limit, etc., it may not
locate all drives. But, for most people, it should work fine. Also, if
there is not so much as a single file on a drive (including a volume label),
it skips that drive for some reason.
Also, this baby is FAST. CHKDSK does a dozen things other than report
disk freespace; this does only one.
*** MS-DOS 6.0 DoubleSpace NOTES ***
Even if you didn't USED to have several logical hard disk drives, if you
use MS-DOS 6.0's new DoubleSpace feature, YOU WILL NOW... Basically, for
each one of your existing drives you compress with DBLSPACE, DOS creates
a new logical drive. I thought I used to have problems with C:-K:. Now,
I've got C:-S:. But, it's worth it for nearly double the disk space. It
lets me put off buying another hard disk drive for another 6 months or so
until I fill up this NEW 200 meg space MS-DOS 6.0 gave me.
By the way. I installed MS-DOS 6.0 yesterday, and it works fine and
seamlessly -- even with DoubleSpace running. No noticeable performance
degradation with DBLSPACE, either. And, if I'm not mistaken, Windows 3.1
seems to run FASTER with DoubleSpace than without it. I'm not sure --
it may be DOS 6.0 itself that is responsible.
Note that under DOS 6.0, the Occupied totals are off. This is due to
the fact that DOS now reports back the ESTIMATED COMPRESSED free space
available to programs. And, OCCUPIED = CAPACITY - AVAILABLE is the
formula we had to use to compute the space in use. AND..., don't take
DOS 6.0's Available space [estimate] as gospel; it is computed based on
the configured compression ratio; it is no longer exact like it used
to be without DoubleSpace.
HINT: If you have a large amount of disk storage (>= 60 meg for this
purpose) AND a tape backup unit, you can save many, many hours if you
follow these steps:
(1) Do a full backup to tape of all hard drives.
(2) Install MS-DOS 6.0.
(3) Delete EVERYTHING except MS-DOS itself.
(3) Install DoubleSpace (run DBLSPACE).
(4) Configure your compressed drives the way you want.
(5) Completely reformat all the hard drives with DBLSPACE.
(6) Restore all your files from tape -- EXCEPT OLD DOS!
If you compress an existing hard drive with DBLSPACE, it first compresses
it, and then does a defragmentation to clean up its own mess. This took
me 2 hours and 44 minutes yesterday to do a measley 80 meg drive. The
thing kept UPPING its time-to-completion estimate every few minutes until
almost the very end. Restoring your files from tape to disk takes maybe
10 minutes for 32 meg. It took DOS over an hour for that same amount of
space.
*** Queen City Software sister-utility: MPATH 6.0 ***
If you found MSCON useful, try its sister utility, MPATH, which displays
ALL of the subdirectories in the root directory of ALL disks in a 43/50 line
EGA/VGA compressed text mode table (required because there are usually so
many of them that they wouldn't fit onto a 25 line screen). Upgraded 5
minutes from now to scan drives all the way to Z:.
MPATH 6.0 is available in ZIP file MPATH6R0.
Please address any comments or inquiries to me at the above address.
David W. Nixon
//end