Short: A simple utility to check your disks Author: Pavel Fedin Uploader: Pavel Fedin Type: disk/misc Version: 1.0 Replaces: CheckDisk.lha Requires: AmigaOS v3.0+ Architecture: m68k-amigaos 1. BACKGROUND One day one of my clients brought be two IDE HDDs and asked to diagnose them. They were working on PC and some bad blocks were on them. I connected them to my A1200 and started "Check Drive" operation of HDInstTools program. It did not find any defects on both drives. This was suspicious. I tried the same operation on my Pentium-200 and it found many bad blocks on them. I was surprised. Then i tried to use old HDToolBox from OS3.1 disks (unfortunately i did not find this operation in OS3.5 HDToolBox at all). It showed no bad blocks too. So i came to a conclusion that those programs use some method which works only on scsi drives. And i decided to write my own disk checker. That's how CheckDisk was born. 2. INSTALLATION No special installation procedure is needed. Just copy CheckDisk program to everywhere you want, for example to C: directory. 3. USAGE It is very easy to use this program. Just go to CLI and enter: CheckDisk . As you see, it works with physical, not logical devices. So it will check the whole hard drive, not only one partition. The usage of this program is not limited to hard drives only. You can use it on everything: ZIP disks, CD disks, even floppies. For example: "CheckDisk scsi.device 0" will check your primary master hard drive. After startup this program tells you about the geometry of your drive and starts checking. It checks the drive by sequentally reading all sectors on the media from 0 to last sector. If CheckDisk encounters a bad block it will report about it. At the end of operation it will also display summary amount of bad blocks on the drive. At any time you can interrupt the program by pressing CTRL-C on the keyboard. The program is compatible with modern drives (large HDDs, DVDs, etc) with media size greater than 4 GB. If it detects that the media is large enough it will use trackdisk64 standard to access the device. Of course, your device driver must support this standard. But it usually does if you use such device. 4. RE-COMPILING To recompile CheckDisk from the supplied source code you'll need modern version of include:utility/utility_lib.i file. The file supplied with SAS/C is old and does not contain UMult64 function definition. You can generate a new file from FD file with FD2Pragma utility, which you can find on Aminet. 5. HISTORY V 1.0 - initial release. 6. FUTURE Of course such an utility should be more user-friendly. It should have a nice GUI with drive map display (like in micro$oft ScanDisk for DOS or Norton Utilities). Also probably it should be more advanced to be able to edit partition tabled in different formats (at least Amiga and PC native) and even to re-partition drives without destroying data on them (like PartitionMagic for Windows). But, in this case it will be quite another program with another name. But i don't know when i will do it. Currently i have many projects and no time. This program was written very quickly (in tho evenings, 3 hours per each). So please don't bomb me with enhancement requests. 7. DISTRIBUTION This program is absolutely freeware. I include its source code with it, you are free to use it as you wish. 8. AUTHOR My name is Pavel Fedin, i live in Moscow, and my E-Mail is: sonic_amiga@rambler.ru. You are free to leave comments and bug reports.