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SPEEDBAK.MAN
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1992-11-09
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SpeedBak User's Manual
Revision B
November 2, 1992
Copyright (C) 1992 MICROTOOLS
1 SpeedBak Introduction
Welcome to SpeedBak. SpeedBak is a powerful, safe yet
simple means of restoring the speed you once had on your
hard drive. Files stored on your disks can be scattered
(fragmented) all over your drive. When you want to use
them, the disk drive must jump all over the disk to retrieve
the necessary data. SpeedBak performs three basic
functions:
1. Files that are fragmented are merged into one
contiguous region on your disk to speed up disk
access.
2. All space between files is removed to minimize your
need to run SpeedBak as frequently. Some programs
give you the option to only defragment your files.
Although this will cause the defragmenter to run
quickly, it is not very useful.
3. Removes unused directory entries.
With these files defragmented and all of the free space on
your disk in one place, your hard drive will have the speed
you once knew back.
SpeedBak is the fastest defragmenter in the known world. We
have tested it against all of the major commercial
competitors using large drives and repeatable random
fragmentation. Depending on the amount of memory you have
available, it can defragment disks with 32,767 files. To
determine the amount of memory required for you disk, the
following equation applies:
SpeedBak memory requirements:
160,000 bytes + (cluster size) + (7 * number of files)
+ (4 * number of clusters)
2 Installing SpeedBak
SpeedBak is installed by inserting the installation disk in
your floppy drive and typing A:INSTALL (or whatever drive
letter that you are installing from). The INSTALL program
will copy the programs to C:\SPEEDBAK by default or to
whatever other directory your specify.
3 Invoking SpeedBak
SpeedBak can be invoked from the command line as follows
(assuming it is in your path):
C:>SPEEDBAK [switches] [drive]
where the optional switches are:
/Z allows you to erase (zero) unused data.
Use this if you are paranoid about your
data.
/NQ allows you to run SpeedBak with no prompts
where [drive] is the optional drive specification
(including the colon). If no drive is specified,
the default drive is defragmented.
SpeedBak should be run with all TSR's removed and all
network drivers removed. This is for your safety and the
safety of your data. The TSR world is a jungle and who
knows what they can do. Even the most benign might be
lurking in the background just waiting to snag your data.
In addition, SpeedBak should not be run from a multi-tasking
environment like DesqView or Windows. SpeedBak detects some
of these environments, but SpeedBak must be the only thing
running while defragmenting your disk.
4 Using SpeedBak
All operation options are self-explanatory. Options may be
chosen by selecting the highlighted hot key or selecting
with the left mouse button.
Once started, SpeedBak can be aborted with the <Esc> key or
the right mouse button.
When SpeedBak starts, it analyzes the drive specified (or
the default drive) to determine a number of statistics for
the drive. The following definitions are applicable to the
statistics screen:
Fragmented files - These are files whose contents do not
occupy contiguous data blocks (sectors) on the disk.
Non-fragmented files - These are files whose contents are
contiguous.
Directories - These are the special files that are used
to organize your disk into manageable sections.
Used Clusters - A cluster is the minimum sized data block
used by DOS to manage files. These clusters are managed
in the File Allocation Table (FAT). A used cluster is
one that has been allocated by one and only one file.
Largest Directory - This number indicates how many
clusters the largest directory uses.
Free Clusters - A free cluster is data block that has not
been allocated by a file.
File Fragments - This number indicates how extra
fragments are on the disk. For example, if there was
only one fragmented file and it was divided into two
fragments, the number of file fragments would be one (not
two since every file has at least one "fragment").
Unmovable files - SpeedBak moves many files in the course
of defragmenting your disk. Certain files are not moved
due to a variety of technical reasons. Certain copy
protection schemes have forced programs like SpeedBak to
not move these files. See section 5 for further details
as to which files are not movable. Since these files are
not moved, they can cause a certain amount of
fragmentation on your disk.
Bad Clusters - When a disk is formatted, the formatting
program marks certain data blocks (clusters) as bad or
not usable. These data blocks are not used by DOS and
will not be used by SpeedBak.
Directory Clusters - This number indicates the number of
clusters used by all of the directories.
Largest File - This number indicates the number of
clusters used by the largest file.
Blocks of free clusters - This number indicates how many
contiguous blocks of free clusters exist.
When defragmenting a hard drive, you will be forced to re-
boot! Some programs do not force this at the risk of your
hard drive! There are too many times that users do not heed
the warning to remove network drives and TSR's to not do
this. When defragmenting a floppy drive, you will be given
the option.
5 Technical Details
SpeedBak has chosen the optimum method of placing the files
on your hard disk. SpeedBak will place all of your
directories at the front of the disk (closest to the FAT).
After that, all files are placed in a best fit algorithm.
Certain files are not moved by SpeedBak because of copy
protection algorithms used by other vendors. The following
files are not moved:
All system and hidden files as well as:
DCONFIG.SYS
IBMBIO.COM
IBMDOS.COM
INSTALL.EXE
IO.BIN
IO.SYSMIO.SYS
MSDOS.SYS
SSTORDRV.SYS
TBIOS.SYS
TDOS.SYS
6 Errors
Under a variety of circumstances, SpeedBak may report
errors.
As mentioned, previously, if SpeedBak detects a multi-
tasking environment, it will print out one of the following
errors where XYZ is the multi-tasking environment:
XYZ is active. SpeedBak should be run from DOS with all
TSRs and multitasking programs removed from memory.
Please remove XYZ from memory (DOS errors #33 and #34).
Every program has it's limits. SpeedBak has certain limits
around which it is designed. It is designed to only handle
a certain number of files, directories, requires a certain
amount of memory and requires a small amount of disk space.
If any of the following occur, and you are a registered
user, please call technical support to discuss the
possibility of increasing these design limitations:
Cannot handle more than 32767 files (#13)
Cannot handle more than 600 directories (#15)
Must have at least 8192 free bytes on disk (#18)
Must have at least 4 clusters free on disk (#19)
Out of memory (#10)
There are certain hardware errors that should never occur
unless your machine is ill. The following are indicative of
a serious hardware problem on your machine (with the
exception of write protect errors):
Read error (#1)
Write error, disk may be write protected. (#31)
Internal error in counting the number of files (#14)
Some problems may occur because of bugs in other disk
software. If you get any of the following errors, unload
all of your TSR's and device drives and try again. The
problem should go away.
Divide error (#55)
If SpeedBak detects a file structure problem on your disk,
it uses CHKDSK to correct it. SpeedBak must be able to find
it. If it cannot, you will get the following message:
Unable to start chkdsk, Please run chkdsk/f on drive
(#30)
Lastly, there are those errors that seem like they are the
user's fault. But since the customer is always right, we
report it as an error. It is difficult to defragment a disk
that has no files on it and even more difficult to respond
to ambiguous commands.
No files on disk (#21)
Bad Command Line Option (#1)