Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!um-math!hyc
From: hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: How is Atari doing in Germany?
Message-ID: <464@stag.math.lsa.umich.edu>
Date: 11 Nov 88 07:10:13 GMT
References: <706@sdcc15.ucsd.edu> <16750@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <6057@killer.DALLAS.TX.US>
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Reply-To: hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu)
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In article <6057@killer.DALLAS.TX.US> ltf@killer.Dallas.TX.US (Lance Franklin) writes:
>In article <16750@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> c60a-2bn@web-2f.berkeley.edu (Lawrence Y. Chiu) writes:
>>Is it possible to write a program that will backup the FAT and the directory
>>of a hard disk partition?  Programs that wipe out hard disks generally do so
>>by destroying the FAT and the directory.
...
>Yup...it's already done on IBM-PC's, which have almost identical disk formats.
>The programs simply create a file in a fixed location on the hard-disk (usually
>the LAST n sectors on the disk) and copy the FAT and directory to this file.

It would seem more useful, to me anyway, if it simply copied this data to any
file of your choice, preferably *on a different drive.*  Any virus writer who
knows about this trick can just as easily take out the last sectors on a disk
as the first. Keep the data on a floppy and you don't have to worry about
what happens to data on the hard drive. Personally, it strikes me as silly to
store a backup FAT in a file on the same disk. If the FAT goes, and that file
*did* somehow get relocated on your disk, you're not going to be able to find
that backup FAT, or at least not easily. This would be a pretty simple program
to write...

Along these lines, I remember a program on the Apple ][ (Remember, the Apple ][?
Not the //e, //c, or IIgs. The ][.  }-) called Multi-Disk Catalog. This program
was a real treat for people with huge numbers of disks, because it could keep
track of disk catalogs ("directories" to you'n'me...  }-) for many disks on a
single disk. Kind of like an indexing program, but just a touch better - it
stored the actual catalog itself in its database. If parts of the original
disk's catalog got wiped, no problem - just restore it off this database, or
just restore enough to retrieve one vital file. Very very handy.
--
  /
 /_ , ,_.                      Howard Chu
/ /(_/(__                University of Michigan
    /           Computing Center          College of LS&A
   '              Unix Project          Information Systems