VERY VERY VERY PRELIMINARY MANUAL FOR BETA-TEST VERSIONS OF DL II! (c) 1987 Simon Poole ALL RIGHTS RESERVED! DL II User's Guide I. Introduction DL II is a checkdisk/unerase/diskedit program with following functions: -Disk usage display -Check of FAT integrity -Check for lost and crosslinked clusters -Some disk fix functions -Automatic and manual unerase -File attribute change -Disk editing, file or sector orientated -Editing of harddisk bootsector DL II will run on any Atari-ST model in medium or high resolution mode, it is completly GEM based. I (Simon Poole) make no warranty of any kind in respect to this manual and the software described in this manual. The user assumes any risk as to the quality and performance of this product. In no event will I be liable for direct, indirect, incidental or consequential damages resulting from any defect in the performance and use of this product. GEM, AES, GEMDOS are trademarks of Digital Research Inc. Atari, ST, TOS are trademarks of Atari Co. MS-DOS is a trademark of Microsoft Inc. II. Getting Started II.1 Running DL II Copy the files DLII.PRG and DLII.RSC to a undamaged disk or harddisk partition. DL II trys to uses the a filename mask of the form DLII*.RSC to search for the resource file, so it will load the first file fitting this specifcation in the search path. Try this with the german resource file DLIIGER.RSC. To run DL II double click or open DLII.PRG, if you don't want a automatic diskcheck performed after most operations, deselect Autocheck in the Options menu (the default value is not to perform a diskcheck). II.2 Terminology A sector is the smallest entity on a disk from the view of the BIOS (Basic Input Output System), on the ST a sector is normally 512 bytes large. Sectors are numbered from zero (normally the so- called bootsector) to the maximum amount of sectors on the device minus one. A cluster is the smallest unit diskspace is allocated in for files on the disk by GEMDOS. On the ST a cluster is normally two sectors large. The FAT (File Allocation Table) keeps track of which clusters are allocated to which file. For more information on TOS and GEMDOS disk structure read chapter III. II.3 Implementation Restrictions The current version of DL II will only handle a sector size of 512 bytes and a maximum clustersize of two sectors, possibly future versions will support a clustersize of 4 (MS-DOS harddisks). II.4 Command Overview The functions of DL II can be divided into three groups: commands which access the disk via the information in the bootsector of the device, commands which do not need a correct bootsector and commands that are not disk related. Do not try to use any of the functions which use the bootsector information on a disk with a corrupted bootsector! Use bootsector: Menu Disk: View/Edit... View and edit the disk on a sector by sector base (see II.5 View/Edit dialog box). Menu File: Files... Select files for a following operation (see II.6 Files dialog box). Check... Perform a diskcheck on the current device. These commands will also be preceded by a diskcheck, if Autocheck is enabled in the Options menu. Don't use bootsector: Menu Disk: Change Disk... Change the current device. View/Edit Bootsector View/Edit the bootsector of the current device. If the bootsector of the current device has been damaged, it may be possible to fix it with the edit function. Non-disk commands: Menu File: Chain to ReOrg... Terminate DL II and start ReOrg.PRG, please consult the appendix A. Quit Terminate DL II. II.5 The View/Edit dialog box II.5.0 Overview This dialog box is used by: Disk: View/Edit, View/Edit Bootsector Files: View/Edit, Unerase Depending on the actual function you are using, some or all of the buttons will be disabled. The number in the top right hand corner tells you which logical sector/cluster you are working on. The number is always relativ to sector zero of the current disk or the first cluster of the file. To leave the View/Edit dialog press or select Exit. A point to note is that in the ASCII display NUL and @ are mapped to space, if you want to enter these to characters use the hexadecimal part of the display. II.5.1 Horizontal slider The left and right arrows decrease/increase the current sector/cluster number by one. A single click in the grey part of the slider bar will decrease/increase the number by 10. The slider can also be dragged to any position. To position the slider at an absolute position, double click the bar and enter the sector/cluster number in the dialog box. All elements in the horizontal slider autorepeat if the mouse-button is pressed for a longer time. II.5.2 Vertical slider The vertical slider, bar and arrows work exactlly the same as in GEM windows, with the execption that all elements autorepeat if the mouse-button is pressed for a longer time. II.5.3 Search function A single click on the search button will call up a dialog box, where you can enter the string you want to search for in normal ASCII form (case sensitive!) or as a hexadecimal number. If a match is found, the first character of the string is inverted for ten seconds, a keypress or a mouse click returns you immediatly. To continue from the current postion double click the search button. If no match is found the last partial match is displayed. II.5.4 Copy function To copy a sector/cluster to a different position on the disk/file select Copy and enter the new position in the dialog box. II.5.5 Add function The Add button is only used by the file Unerase function, please consult the chapter on that. II.5.6 Editing To edit a sector/cluster: single click in the ASCII or hexa- decimal part of the dialog box, a cursor will appear which can be moved with the cursor keys, text or numbers entered will effect both parts of the display immediatly. Press to exit from edit mode. If you decide not to write to disk the contents of the internal buffer will NOT be updated, so you can move to a different part of the cluster/sector and carry on with editing. To reread the sector/cluster from disk, double click in the ASCII or hexadecimal part of the display. II.6 The File menu II.6.0 Overview II.6.1 The Files dialog box This dialog form works much the same as the standard GEM fileselector, differences: all parts of the vertical slider auto- repeat, only the actual filename is selectable. To return from a subdirectory (folder) to its parent directory; select the '..' entry. II.6.2 Chain to ReOrg If you are using DL II from the GEM-Desktop, this command will immediatley terminate DL II and start ReOrg.PRG (if ReOrg.PRG is in the current desktop search path). II.6.3 Quit Terminate DL II immediatley. II.7 The File operation dialog II.7.0 Overview II.7.1 Erase II.7.2 Unerase [Recover would be a better expression] II.7.3 Edit entry II.7.4 Show fragmentation II.7.5 View/Edit II.7.6 Next and Previous buttons II.8 The Disk menu II.8.0 Overview II.8.1 Check Selecting the Check command will start a check of all the files and directories on the current drive, things that are checked: -lost clusters (clusters that are marked as used, but do not belong to a file or directory) -crosslinked clusters (clusters that are used by two different files) -bad directory entries (zero length files, first cluster out of range) -other catastropic errors in file allocation Once the check is finished a dialog form will show the results of the operation. If DL II finds something wrong with the disk structure, it will show that in this dialog. If DL II can fix the problem, the Fix button will be enabled. To get a printout of the results, select the Protocol button. You will notice that bad directory entries to not cause the Fix button to be enabled, please use the Protocol option to find out what is causing trouble and delete the approbiate file if necessary. The format of the Protocol file list is: Filename Attribute Start-Cluster Filesize Error-Message The Fix command will truncate files to avoid crosslinked clusters and generate files of the form 99999999.FIX (where 99999999 is an unique number) in the root directory out of lost clusters. Since only unused (and not deleted) entries are used, there is a limit to the number of files that can be generated. If you have problems with this, you can change deleted entries into unused entries by changing the first letter of the filename from $E5 (å) to $00, but be careful this also marks the end of used entries in the directory! IMPORTANT: DON'T USE THE FIX FUNCTION WITHOUT MAKING AN IMAGE BACKUP OF THE DISK FIRST! II.8.2 View/Edit II.8.3 View/Edit Bootsector II.8.4 Change Current Disk II.9 The Options menu If Autocheck is enabled every time the current disk is changed or a operation is performed which may change the disk, a diskcheck operation is performed. III. TOS Disk Structure [This part will be interesting, for now have a look at: Inside the IBM-PC by Peter Norton] IV. Everything that DL II can do.. [Just a list of everything] Appendix A: ReOrg, a disk reorganizer IMPORTANT: REORG IS NOT A STANDALONE PROGRAM! YOU NEED AT LEAST A IMAGE BACKUP PROGRAM AND A DISKCHECK PROGRAM BEFORE YOU CAN USE IT! IMPORTANT: ALWAYS, ALWAYS MAKE AN IMAGE BACKUP OF YOUR DISK BEFORE RUNNING REORG ON IT! ReOrg improves disk performance on harddisk and floppys through better placement of subdirectories and there files on disk and through defragmentation of the files themselves, it will also remove deleted and zero length entries. As the actual reorganizing is NOT an incremental process, during the time from the start of the reorganization to the end of it your disk is in a unusable condition (at least from the viewpoint of the operating system). This means, that a power failure, computer malfunction, disk error or program failure during the reorganization will leave you with a corrupted disk! To run ReOrg backup your disk, run the diskcheck program on it (DL II will work ok) and ONLY run ReOrg after all crosslinked and lost clusters have been disposed of! ReOrg has NO protection against incorrect disks and will probably run into a infinite loop if you do not take these precautions! After you have run ReOrg and reorganized your disk, the computer will reboot, this is normal and serves the purpose of reinitilizing the TOS internal directory tree. A verbal description of how ReOrg rebulids your disk is: 'Every (sub)directory is immediately followed by all the files it owns, followed by all the subdirectories it is parent of. Using the last sentence recursively, the place of every file on the disk is determined now' (from the Reformat manual by Jos Wennmacker) This also implys that after you have reorganised your disk, the amount of clusters ReOrg reports it has to move after a bit of work on the disk will be quite large, I would recommend not using ReOrg again before the performance of your disk actually drops. Appendix B: Error messages