Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!apple!oliveb!amiga!cbmvax!daveh
From: daveh@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Haynie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: The Disk Recovery Trail
Message-ID: <8116@cbmvax.UUCP>
Date: 6 Oct 89 19:41:42 GMT
Organization: Commodore Technology, West Chester, PA
Lines: 32

I'm doing some more work on DiskSalv these days (I've released as well a
new minor update to 1.40 with some bug fixes but no new features, called
1.42, which I'll post here whenever the binaries group is reanimated), and
I've considered implementing, amoung other things, a "fix the disk in place"
option.  Generally, when I mention the concept of fix-in-place, I get one 
of two opinions:

	[1] Somewhere between "I'm seriously jazzed" to "we should have had
	    this stupid capability, in a reliable form, since day 1".

	[2] Somewhere betwene "I'll never trust it" to "if you put that in
	    DiskSalv you're a whore".

I think I have a reasonable way of addressing both the desire and the fears
(obviously veterans of early DiskDoctors...) of this question, and I'm
pretty sure I know how to handle it.  DiskSalv is basically an expect system
that knows how to best recover blasted disk structures, and there's no reason
the same methodology can't be applied to the "Fix-in-place" problem, as a
program option.  But I am interested in any kind of feedback from the world,
which explains this posting.  As a result of some of the new stuff I'm playing
with, something akin to a reasonable UnDelete facility almost drops out 
automatically in this version of DiskSalv.

The other question is how to distribute it -- it's starting to get too good
to give away for free :-)....  And it's starting to need a real life user
manual.


-- 
Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga (Systems Engineering) "The Crew That Never Rests"
   {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh      PLINK: hazy     BIX: hazy
                    Too much of everything is just enough