Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!imagen!atari!portal!cup.portal.com!Thomas_E_Zerucha
From: Thomas_E_Zerucha@cup.portal.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Hard Disk Crash
Message-ID: <8364@cup.portal.com>
Date: 22 Aug 88 01:05:57 GMT
References: <5037@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> <441@forty2.UUCP>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 33
XPortal-User-Id: 1.1001.3273

Simon Poole writes>
"There is no safe version of this kind of program"

This is ultimately true, but then again, you could have a random bit error
tell your hard disk controller to do a format.  There is a commercial
alternative - in fact I wrote it, so I stand to profit from this, so the
information may contain some of these biases.  The program is "Hard Disk
Sentry" and is available from Beckemeyer Development Tools.  It is as safe
as any such utility can be.  First it performs a thourough check of the
disk structure, and if you select optimize (It is still wise to back things
up), it will do it by maintaining a correct backup image of each file, so
the worst that will happen is that you will have a bunch of clusters which
don't belong to any file - i.e. it first copies the images of the files to
an unused portion of the disk, then it links these clusters, then it finally
unlinks the original area.  You can interrupt such a process anytime without
losing data, unless lightning strikes your computer.  And any potential
errors are easily recovered from using the repair feature.  I tried more
than a few times hitting reset right in the middle of the operation and
haven't lost a byte of data (again, the worst thing were the leftover
backup images which the repair would collect into one folder which I
simply deleted).  *Don't try this at home*.
  In short, I did most of the extra work to create a "safe" repair/optimize
utility.  But it is commercial and you should contact Beckemeyer if you
are interested in a copy.
  (Disclaimer: I have tested it extensively, but it can have problems
and create trashed disks if your hardware is marginal and writing a sector
from any program may not work, you cannot expect my program to recover
from such instances.  Also, I use it with all kinds of TSRs and Accessories
including Caches, although I specifically warn against it since I can't
predict what any given program will do in combination with mine.  I am not
claiming that it will *never* trash any disk under any circumstances, just
that I have taken every reasonable precaution to prevent it in the algorithms
I chose.  You still should backup).