Hi Karen, the utilities recommended by Rober To sound useful: HDAT2 harddisk repair and diagnostics ATA, ATAPI, SATA, USB, SCSI ASTRA Advanced Sysinfo Tool and Reporting Assistant HWiNFO system information, monitoring and diagnostics
Do you recall the items in norton utilities?
There is a wikipedia article about them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Utilities The first version in 1982 included: unerase - Freedos comes with a simple undelete tool filefix - "repairs damaged files" (?) disklook - apparently a floppy disk cluster map display? secmod - floppy disk sector changer (disk editor, I guess?) filehide - Freedos attrib should be sufficient for that bathide - related to filehide timemark - "displays date, time, elapsed time" scratr - sets colors, you can use ANSI and PROMPT for that reverse - sets colors to black on white clear - you can use cls for that filesort - sorts directories on disk diskopt - tunes floppy access speed beep - just beeps the speaker print - prints files Which free and open tools for directory sorting and disk editors do we have in the distro at this time? I guess diskopt works by creating an interlaced floppy sector format, which tools do we have for this style? According to wikipedia, Norton Utilities 2.0 added filefind and renames print to lprint because MS DOS 2.0 already came with a tool called print itself. In version 3.0, you get additional tools for file size and directory listings, system information, text search, wiping of disks and files etc. Which tools do we recommend for directory listings, file size info and wiping? For size info, I would use the GNU "du" tool, which is available as DJGPP compiled DOS binary. What could we recommend for finding files and text? I guess the GNU tools "find" and "grep" would be useful choices here? Similar for "wipe". Version 3.1 adds unerase and unremove directory tools. New in version 4: Defrag tool (speed disk) and format recover. The defrag tool is the same which MS DOS 6 bundled later on. New in version 4.5: "batch enhander" and a disk editor, the ncache disk cache (faster than smartdrive / smartdrv) and diag. Version 5 improves the disk editor further and bundles 4DOS in a variant called NDOS. By now, 4DOS is sort of free/open. Version 6 adds Win3.1 icons and "diskreet" and improves the system info. The unerase tool now supports the same optional delete tracking driver as MS / central point undelete does. Version 7 adds support for compressed disks (doublespace, stacker and superstor formats) and norton disk doctor. Would be good to know which features the disk doctor had exactly. The final DOS version 8 just adds some Win3.1 related tools. Later versions gradually add Win9x, FAT32, WinNT etc. support and features specific to Windows, like a registry editor. Even a line of products for Apple Macintosh existed. Competitors to Norton Utilities: Central Point PC Tools, various smaller ones. The author of spinrite claims norton disk doctor is a rip of it: https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-666.htm Spinrite scans disks for recoverable files and even tries some tricks to reconstruct data from almost unreadable sectors, but only supports 128 GB style CHS, not LBA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinRite claims FreeDOS bundled with SpinRite to trigger some 16-4-8-bit CHS overflow > 128 GB? Well-known free/open alternatives are photorec and testdisk. The batch enhancer is similar to our v8 power tools, I guess. It can beep and show messages in color and with text boxes etc. Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
