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---------------- DiskX V2.2 By STEVE TIBBETT ---------------- This manual is created chronologically. When I add new features, I tack the description onto the end. If you have used DiskX before, skip ahead to the notes on whatever version is new to you. This special edition of DiskX adds a "bootsave" feature that will let you store boot blocks of protected commercial software, to protect them should a virus attack the original. INTRODUCTION: DiskX's main purpose in life is to be a sector-based disk editor, as opposed to a file-based editor such as NewZap. DiskX can also be used as a file editor. That will be discussed a bit later on. DiskX lets you view the disk in a block-by-block format. It also lets you find strings of text anywhere on the disk, find the first block of any file, to view each block either as the mass of hex numbers it really is, and to view the block as what it represents to AmigaDOS (i.e., file header block, user directory block and such. The different block types there can be found in the AmigaDOS Manual by Bantam Books. Important Note: When you run DiskX, it will leave the motor running on whatever floppy drive you are currently examining. Don't worry about it. WHAT IS A DOS DEVICE? DiskX lets you look at anything that AmigaDOS sees as a device. If you have a hard disk, there should be a hddisk.device, jdisk.device, or something similar in the DEVS: directory on your Workbench disk. This also goes for the VD0: recoverable ram disk, which has asdg.vdisk.device there. Note that the RAM: disk is not really a DOS device. It is managed by the RAM-HANDLER in the L directory, making it ineligible. Also, DiskX will not allow you to look at the PAR:, PRT:, SER:, NIL:, or anything else that isn't a device, because printers and modems don't like being asked to return a specific cylinder. RUNNING IT When you first run DiskX, there is a menu on the menu bar called "Unit", and on this menu will be all the "Devices" the system recognizes at the time. It will also show you the name of the "Driver" that controls that device - "trackdisk.device" for a floppy and the like. Workbench 1.3 includes a recoverable RAM: disk called "RAD:". To DiskX, this is just another device. MODES OF OPERATION DiskX has two modes of operaiton: HEX mode and INTERPRET mode. HEX MODE Hex Mode will allow you to look at what is actually in the block, 256 bytes at a time. If you are looking at the first half of the block, the offset will be less than 100 (in hex). The offset is displayed at the bottom right of the screen and reflects the current cursor position. The cursor can be moved around either with the mouse point and click or with the cursor keys. While in hex mode, pressing the Return key will let you to enter ASCII text, starting at the current cursor position. Move the cursor to where you want to start, press Return, type your text, then press Return again. Note that the cursor keys will not work when you are entering text, but the mouse pointer will still allow you to move the cursor. When in Hex Mode, there are a couple of extra gadgets (the square, obnoxious-looking things) that pop up on the bottom of the screen. There are the "Other Half" gadget, which will show you the other half of the block; the modify gadget, which will let you edit contents of that byte in either hex, decimal, or binary; and the show type gadget, which will flip you into interpret mode. If you are running DiskX from the CLI, you can enter a commandline argument "INTERLACE," which will cause DiskX to run in Interlaced mode, showing you all 512 bytes of a block on one screen. INTERPRET MODE This is where the excitement lies! In Interpret mode, instead of just showing you what is in the block as hex, it tries to make some sense out of the block the same way AmigaDOS does, showing only the contents of the block that are relevant to that block type. For example, if the block is a data block, you will see the contents of actual DATA part of the block in the middle of the screen, and at the top of the screen you will see where that block's file header block is located, its sequence number, location of the next block and size of that next block. When you're in Interpret mode, a few other keys come into play, also depending on what type of block you are examining. The left and right cursor keys will move up/down by one block. R will move you to that disk's root block. P will bring you to that block's parent block, if it has one. N will bring you to the next block, if the current block type supports it. W will tell it to write the block back to the disk, and E does won't do a darn thing. Also, if the block type supports it, you will get either a "First Block", "Next Block", or a "Parent Block" gadget on the screen. FIND Find will let you search for a string of text. Type the string, then select either to start from Here (the current Block Number), or Block #0. KEY NUMBER VERSUS BLOCK NUMBER The terms "key" and "block" get used fairly often here - they both mean the same thing. They refer to the current block number, which is how far into the disk we are in 512 byte blocks. PARENT BLOCK AND HEADER BLOCK These two terms end up being used a good bit in the program. Again, they both mean the same thing: that this block is pointed to. GETTING OUT All good things must come to an end, and you've got three ways to end it all from here: press the ESC key, click on the quit gadget, or use the quit menu option. And you're out. NOTES -- DiskX will only work properly on devices which use a 512 byte block. I have yet to see one that uses a different size block, so it didn't seem like a big problem. -- If you want to change anything on your KickStart disk, there is a public domain program called SumKick, which will fix the checksum on the KS disk for you after you've changed it. Otherwise, whenever you Reboot, it will want back Kickstart. USES Here are some uses: -- If you live in Canada, (like all the real people in the world, eh? Turn the heat up, Bob.), you can take any program which refers to "State" and change it to refer to "Prov." using the Find command. -- You can find hidden messages in your Kickstart disk. -- You can dig through your favorite game to find all kinds of strings which may be helpful. -- You can waste a lot of time going through programs which hide any ASCII text contained in them. -- Using the Write Block to File option, you could take any auto-booting disk (the kind that uses the boot sector to load the game), write it to a file, and disassemble it or whatever. NEW FEATURES The following are features that were new with the 2.0 release: -- Works with any DOS device, include hard disks. -- Ability to search the disk for ASCII strings without being case-sensitive. -- Ability to recover a deleted file from any device. -- Ability to view all ASCII strings on the disk in a simple manner. USING OTHER DOS DEVICES DiskX will now read the DeviceList and find any device you are using in the system, if it is a block-based device. If your favorite device isn't on the "Unit" menu, here's how to get it: bring up the "Find File" requester from the Project menu, and type the device name into the drawer area. That should do it - if you go for "Disk Info" on the same menu, you will see info on it. CASE-INDEPENDENT SEARCH When you search (using the Find... gadget on the main screen), if the first character of the pattern you are searching for is an asterisk ( * ). it will ignore the case of the string it is seeking. If you tell it to search for *Hello, it would find Hello, hELLO, HeLlO and other variations. If the first character of the pattern you enter to seek is an "@" (at sign), DiskX will treat this as though you were looking for a file name. It will ignore case and will only stop at blocks which are file headers whose file name matches this pattern. More on this later. SEARCHING FOR TEXT STRINGS You can now search the whole disk, starting at either block zero, or from the current position, for any ASCII text. It will display any text string longer than six characters. It's a menu option. Also, if you select the "Through Links" option, you can start searching from a file header (using the "Find File Header" menu option to find the file header) to search through a particular file for text. Also, take a look through the Kickstart disk. There is much interesting material there. RECOVERING FILES You've just deleted a file. The file's name is LostFile, and it is on DH0:. Here's how to get it back: 1. Select the DH0: menu option on the Project menu in the Unit Number submenu. Same thing applies for any device. 2. Click on the Find... gadget on the bottom of the main screen. Tell it to search for "@LostFile". This will find LostFile's file header block and make it the current block. Remember that the @ sign tells DiskX you're looking for a file header. You will probably have to try the "Show Type" gadget to get it to tell you that it is a file header. Note that doing a Find on a hard disk can take a good bit of time. 3. Select the "Recover..." menu option. DiskX will then search the entire disk for any block whose parent block field points to the file header for LostFile. That's block belonging to Lostfile. 4. When the search is completed there will be a file requester asking you where you want the file to be written. DO NOT WRITE THE FILE TO THE SAME DEVICE FROM WHICH YOU ARE RECOVERING IT. While the chances are you won't have any major problems doing it, things could go wrong. A safe place to write to is the RAM: disk, and it's the default drive when this requester appears. 5. After you've entered the new name for the file here, choose OK or press Return, and the file will be recovered. That's it. NEW FEATURES TO 2.1 Bug Fixes: No longer writes back to wrong HD partition NEW TO 2.2 The "bootsave": feature. RECOVERING FILES THE HARD WAY On the special menu, there is an option to write the current block to a file. The first time you select this option, you will be asked for the file name into which you want to write the data. Each time you go for this option after that, it will write the block into the same file, if you haven't closed it already. If you plan to write a number of blocks during the same session, don't close the file after each write. Wait until you have written all you want and then close the file. If the block you are writing is a data block (part of a file), only the data part of the block (488 bytes) will be written; otherwise, all 512 bytes, including the block's checksum, will be written. If you forget to close the file on quitting, DiskX closes it for you. If when you first select the drive, the block you see is not of type root block, you will have to go up or down a cylinder or two to find it. It's just a minor task. Also, the "Disk Info" menu option will show the disk's name wrong. END OF TEXT