> Indeed, so does the Sam and so does CP/M (although the ? is probably a > zero character).
Yes, but....... In MSDOS, the FAT table is cleared -- space the file used to take up is filled with zeroes to mark those clusters as free... so how does it work out which belonged to which file. (NB: THis is what every book I've looked in so far, from Norton to the PC Low Level Programmer's Handbook (or whatever it was called) says happens -- there's no mention of keeping the FAT "as-is") > > To undelete > > all you have to replace the '?' with some legal character. Then IF you'r > > lucky and MS/DOS have not used any of the sectors related to that > > file, voila, you have an undeleted file. > > Of course, a good undelete utility checks all the sectors to make sure > they are not used by any other file. If they are not, then you have a > good chance of getting a good copy, and otherwise you are stuffed... I've got a really groovy directory cleaner (would have evolved to a defragmenter if I'd had the time) for the SAM -- it takes the directory, sorts it into alphabetical order, moves all erased files to the end of the directory and deletes any erased files which can't be unerased (from the current status of the directory) totally from the directory. Si Cooke
