Renaming Toolbars in Excel
Windows 95 - backups and bugbears
WordPerfect remote printing simplified
Conner 32-bit disk access in WFW3.11
Cut cluster bloat with DriveSpace 3
Formatting bootable hard drives
While updating my Help Screen database I happened to notice the letter in the March 1995 issue from Gert Christensen regarding the naming of custom tools. I can't understand how I missed it at the time.
Toolbar buttons in Excel can be renamed using the following macro:
Sub ToolTipSetter()
Toolbars("Standard").ToolbarButtons(22).Name="FileList"
End Sub
The name in the first parentheses is the name of the toolbar, the number in the second parentheses is the number of buttons and spaces from the left-hand end of the toolbar, and the text in inverted commas is the name of the button.
- David Bond
Editor's note: Thanks David. Perhaps you or another reader knows how to do the same thing in Word for Windows. If anyone needed any evidence that the various departments of Microsoft don't conspire very heavily, they need look no further than the vast differences in implementation between the Microsoft desktop applications.
Mike Lucek (Readers Forum, February 1996, on page 38) is laid back about Windows 95, but there are many people who have had real difficulties (graphics in particular). They have found problems with Win95 utilities, and with some Windows 3.11 programs that won't run (tweaking Properties or not). MoreFonts for Windows 3.1 won't print at all. And the three Norton programs for Windows 95 are superb, but devour memory to the extent that 16Mb of RAM appears a rock-bottom requirement.
I am a great fan of Windows 95 but not blind to its quirks. The gurus who write on Windows 95 for the various computer magazines should perhaps be more penetrating, and not content to keep a few steps ahead of the rest of us! For Starters, here are a few notes on backing up disk drives.
Consider the Windows 95 Full System Backup Set, which I promptly found won't work with floppy diskettes (nor apparently with Zip drives). The program is a "cut down" version of the Colorado Tape System. Microsoft was very helpful, phoning me twice (it pays to be a Communiqué member!) to confirm a problem existed and alerting me to neat little utilities squirreled away on the CD-ROM in the Other\Misc folder [the files are in Other\Misc\Cfgback and Other\Misc\Eru]. CFGBACK.EXE will back up the Registry files in compressed form, and optionally reinstate these files. ERU.EXE enables you to create a special bootable Emergency Recovery Diskette.
For diskette backup, Microsoft suggests making a normal full drive backup (this will exclude Registry files, etc) and then running CFGBACK.EXE and ERU.EXE. Sounds great, but then try recovering a file on, say, the 70th diskette - the program requires you to work your way through the diskettes starting with Number 1, until the file is found! Alternatively, on your day off, try backing up your hard disk using Norton Utilities 95 Zip's spanning feature: "Insert next diskette . . . insert previous diskette . . . now reinsert next diskette . . ." Unbelievable! No, I don't want to buy a tape drive!
Instead, try the best option of using the very fast WinZip32. It won't back up any files with +S [system] attribute, nor any TrueType font files, although only some have the +S attribute, because the entire fonts folder is treated as a System Folder. Maybe some reader knows how to get into WinZip32's options to get around this constraint.
- George Dash
Editor's note: Thanks George. We discussed a way to create a disaster recovery backup in our March Disaster Recovery feature on page 75, and also in our March Star-Dot-Star section on page 196. One difficulty, as you point out, is that many copying or backup programs, including MS-DOS xcopy and winzip, don't copy files with a system attribute. It's difficult to understand why not. Because many folders and files vital for running Windows 95 have a +S attribute, you can't backup your full system using these utilities.
Another difficulty is that DOS doesn't support long file names, so if you want to restore your entire system from DOS, you have to first find a way to convert your long file names to short file names before the backup, and restore them afterward. A utility called LFNBK.EXE (on the Windows 95 CD-ROM in the Admin/Apptools/Lfnback folder) gets around this. You have to run LFNBK.EXE from a DOS Window under Windows 95, presumably because it can't see the long file names unless Windows 95 is running. It creates a file, containing a table, in which short file names are related to the equivalent long file names. It also sets all the file names to short versions. Now, because you're in Windows 95, suddenly you find that your system doesn't quite work as before, because vital system folders, such as Start Menu, have long names with spaces.
Once you've run lfnbk /b c: you have to exit Windows 95 immediately, and copy everything to your backup media.
When you want it back, you can use a DOS utility to restore it, and you can actually boot Windows 95 without restoring the long file names. Your desktop looks odd, because its Start Menu is broken and some short file names may be showing under shortcuts. Now, using the Run command, you run lfnbk /r c: to restore your long file names. The full details, well documented, are in lfnbk.txt in the folder with LFNBK.EXE.
I recently developed a procedure using a Zip drive for backing up a Windows 95 system, using LFNBK.EXE. This works but it's very odd to use - hardly a smooth, automated system - requiring several reboots and manual interventions.
To do the backup, I used the Iomega Windows 95 disk copying utility, which works very well. It has no problems with system files.
To perform the restore process from DOS, I used, of all things, Norton Commander for DOS version 5, which can be set to copy all files including system files in all subdirectories. You can also use a few shareware DOS copy programs, such as TurboCopy and PCopy. These make uncompressed copies on the Zip disk, which makes recovery of individual files very simple. You can even run backed-up utilities from the Zip disk before you restore your system.
On the whole, backing up a whole system to floppy by this method seems excessive. You may as well reinstall Windows 95 from floppy, and then you can work with long file names. You're going to be feeding floppies to the system for hours, no matter what you do. If you have Windows 95 on CD-ROM, it's much better to reinstall it. A Zip drive is a cheap alternative, and a good high-capacity tape drive is a good solution.
We're still waiting to hear of a good 32-bit backup system that works on floppy diskettes, tape, and removable media such as Zip drives. If you find one, please let the rest of us know.
Regarding The Help Screen for March, in regard to Quicken, I followed the advice in September 1995 and set my autobackup to zero. Everything worked as advertised; no more entries in the backup directory, and no reverting to the initial first-time user mode.
In the Windows Q&A section, regarding remote printing simplified [page 192], I think you have outlined a very complex solution to a simple problem. When saving the original file in MS-Word 6, the Save as File Type box should be set to WordPerfect for Windows 5.x. (Note that Microsoft couldn't even list the file types in alphabetical order: there are two sections of WordPerfect file types, 5.x is in the second as you scroll down the list.) When the file is opened in WordPerfect 6.1 it will automatically convert the 5.x file to 6.1 as it loads, and you can print away to your hearts content. I checked this and it works OK. The formatting appears to be retained, even to the extent of columns being kept as original.
- Barry Redshaw
Editor's note: Thanks Barry. That's a lot easier than worrying about DOS printing. Every time we bemoan our fate as Windows users, it's worth casting our memories back to the days of DOS.
[Like Albert Fisher, March 1996 Star-Dot-Star, page 200] I too installed a Conner 528 HDD and got the famous WDCRTL message, being unable to access the 32-bit disk driver in WFW3.11.
I first tried to download Albert's WDCDRV.386 from idg.com.au, but kept getting a corrupt file, the DOC part of which I couldn't read with ZIP. Presumably the EXE file was also corrupt (this was probably a line fault).
I then tried going straight to Western Digital on the 'Net, and downloaded their version directly. Alas, I still could not validate 32-bit disk access, despite carefully inserting the driver in the [386enh] section of system.ini. I kept getting weird messages like "Fatal error - abnormal disk geometry".
In desperation I then accessed Conner directly and downloaded the proprietary package 32bit.exe, which when installed produces a help file giving clear instructions on how to insert the essential driver, which is called mh32bit.386. Essentially, this inserts into system.ini in the same way, first "remming out" wdcrtl and then placing device=c:\windows\mh32bit.386 (or relevant path).
Hooray! It works perfectly! But it gets mysteriouser and mysteriouser - one question answered and another asked! Why Albert's and not mine?
However, I think Conner users should be aware of my problem and its solution. The moral is don't forget to seek out the proprietary driver - it often works.
- Dagmar Barnes
Editor's note: Thanks Dagmar. Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to fail, abort and retry.
Peter Maggio asked a question about partitioning a large hard disk to reduce cluster sizes [General Q&A, April '96, p192]. There is an alternative for people using Win 95 and the MS Plus! pack. You can use Drivespace 3 to manage the use of clusters without enabling compression. On normal compressed volumes the data for a cluster must be stored in contiguous sectors. So many sectors can be free, but not enough contiguous to store a cluster. Drivespace 3 can store data for a fragmented cluster in a linked list of sectors.
Here is a bit more info from Win95-L [an online discussion]. Lamont Adams wrote: Hey, serious question here: under Win95 is it necessary to partition large hard drives off to get around the cluster size bloat that affected DOS? Or was that "fixed" under Win95? If you have Microsoft Plus! you can install Drivespace 3 and choose "no compression", then you'll use the new VxD for sector allocation granularity only. In other words, it won't compress the data (ie, no performance hit, not that there is much of one anyway), so the biggest waste you'll have is 512 bytes (well, 511 bytes) rather than 8, 16 or 32K.
- Peter Williams
Louis Hissink wrote about formatting bootable hard drives [Star dot star, April '96, p212]. What he said is partly correct, but you don't have to have the drive installed as C: to successfully format it as bootable. In the case that you want to replace your old disk with the new one and you wish to keep the contents of your old drive by transferring them to the new one, this is what you do:
0. Make a bootable floppy that contains FDISK, FORMAT, SYS, etc.
1. Install the new drive as a slave to the current one, or put it in as master on the second IDE channel if you have one.
2. FDISK the new drive and setup the Primary DOS partition and any other partitioning that you want.
3. Type the command:
Format D:/s r
replacing D: with whatever the correct letter is for the new drive.
4. Copy all of C:\ to D:\ or whatever the new drive is.
5. Remove the old drive and put the new one in it's place as Master on the first IDE channel.
6. Boot from your bootable floppy that contains FDISK, etc, and run FDISK. Use it to set the primary DOS partition on the new disk as Active.
7. Reboot from the new drive and breathe a sigh of relief when the thing starts up looking just like it did before the surgery.
8. Put the lid on.
PS. This doesn't work under Win 95. It gets more complicated.
- Peter Williams
Editor's note: Peter, I like your tips and I like your style. That's a beauty about using DriveSpace 3 to reduce cluster bloat. But best of all I like the way you began numbering your list of steps with zero.
One can only suppose that by "it gets more complicated" you are referring to this infernal problem of long file names under DOS. By creative and conscientious use of the lfnbk utility, you can probably get around that.