SKID ROW presents Quarterback Tools V1.3a December 2, 1990 Thanks for purchasing Quarterback Tools! All of us at Central Coast Software are grateful for your support. This document lists changes to the program and other notes which didn't make it into the manual. We tried very hard to make Quarterback Tools as reliable and as robust as possible. We have tested it extensively on many different Amigas and under a wide variety of conditions. But we cannot guarantee that it will solve every problem which can arise with your disk drives. Quarterback Tools has evolved over a period of time, and its features and capabilities are growing all the time. We welcome your comments and suggestions for improving the product. If you experience problems with Quarterback Tools, please contact us about the situation. We need to know your exact hardware configuration and as much information about the problem as you can provide. TROUBLE REPORT FORM We have included on the Tools master disk a copy of our Tools Trouble Report Form. The information requested is needed by Tech Support to understand the problem you are reporting. You can send the form to us by mail or FAX (303) 526-0520), or can send it to our BBS at (316) 686-0870. If you call us to report a problem, at (303) 526-1030, you can expedite the process by answering the questions before placing the call. **************************************************************************** A WORD TO THE WISE FROM TOOLS TECH SUPPORT The best piece of advise I can give is this: Don't get caught without a backup. NEVER!! Let's look a recent call to tech support. A customer was in the middle of reorganizing his hard drive with QUARTERBACK TOOLS, when the power failed. Not a fault of Tools, but still a problem. Tech support suggested that he restore his hard drive from his backup. Unfor- tunately, he had not taken the time to make a backup. We hear this all too often. BACKUP FIRST, THEN REORGANIZE!!! **************************************************************************** QBSNAP REPLACES QBFORMAT We decided after the manual was printed to change the QBFORMAT program. QBFORMAT was originally intended as a replacement for the Workbench FORMAT program. Later we added the "snapshot" capability to preserve the existing format in case a subsequent "unformat" became necessary. Quarterback Tools has extensive formatting capability, so a separate QBFORMAT seems to be unnecessary. We recommend that you delete or rename the existing FORMAT program in the SYSTEM drawer. That way you will have to use Quarterback Tools for all formatting. This gives you the chance to format "safely", a feature not provided by the normal "FORMAT" program. The other function for QBFORMAT described in the manual is to take a "snapshot" of your hard disk volumes so that you can readily restore a volume to its last "snapshot" in case it gets corrupted. We have provided a program called QBSNAP which performs this function. QBSNAP runs only from CLI, but can be placed in your startup-sequence or some other script to perform automatic snapshots of each disk drive on your system. You can also schedule it using a timer program to take snapshots of your drives at particular times of day. To run QBSNAP, type: QBSNAP drive where "drive" is the name of the disk drive (NOT the volume name) you wish to "snapshot". The program preserves critical volume information in a small file called QBT.FMT, from which it can be restored in a process we call "unformatting". BLITZDISK Disk cache programs such as BLITZDISK are known to interfere with Tools. If you use such a cache program, you MUST disable it before running Quarterback Tools. If you do NOT, the result may be a scrambled disk. SECTORAMA, FIXDISK, IC, AND IB As you may have noticed, we have included on the Tools disk a few public domain "sector editor" and utility backup programs which you may find useful in the event of problems with a disk volume. These programs are supplied "as is". We included them to provide some additional tools for finding and correcting hard disk problems which might arise while using Tools. We will advise you when there is a need to use these programs and we will provide instructions in their use at that time. If you use these programs without our direction, you assume all risks of corruption or damage to the data structures of your disk volume. These programs are potentially very dangerous. We cannot be responsible for for any damage which may occur if you use them improperly. ATTENTION 2090/2090A USERS We have found that some users of the 2090 or 2090A hard disk controllers using ST506 (non-SCSI) disk drives are experiencing a high error rate when using Tools to find and unreadable blocks. The problems always shows up as an excessively high number of bad blocks at the very high end of the highest partition on the disk drive. The problem arises when the high cylinder parameter of the mountlist entry for the highest partition on the drive is set too high. This causes Tools to try to access cylinders beyond the useful area of the drive. The hard disk driver then appears to lock out further access to the drive, causing other errors. The solution is to lower the high cylinder parameter by one or two cylinders, thereby limiting Tools (and AmigaDOS) to valid areas of the drive. ICONS "DISAPPEAR" Some users have reported that after reorganizing a volume, Workbench refuses to display some of the icons known to exist on the volume. The icon files are actually present on the volume, but Workbench refuses to display them. We are still studying this problem, which occurs only rarely. In the mean time, if it happens to you, we recommend deleting the .info file on the affected drawer. Then reboot the Amiga. Workbench will rebuild the .info file if it cannot find one, which seems to cure the problem. CHANGES IN VERSION 1.3 Problems with certain hard disk controllers corrected - Earlier versions of Tools experienced crashes and "hangup" problems during volume reorganization with the following hard disk controllers: - Commodore 2090/2090A - Supra Wordsync - Trumpcard and Trumpcard Professional - Microbotics Hardframe We believe that all these problems have been corrected with version 1.3. However, we suggest that you check with your hard drive manufacturer to make sure that you are using the latest hardware/software. Attention Supra Wordsync owners: you should make sure that you are using the latest version of the hard disk driver software. At this time, it is Supra Series II v1.10d. This has been tested successfully with Tools. Contact Supra for the latest version of the driver software. Lockup before displaying available volumes - On certain Amiga configurations, earlier versions of Tools would lock up after the greeting requester, never displaying the list of available volumes. This was traced to a sensitivity to certain non-AmigaDOS devices, such as a Cross-Dos device, Mac-2-Dos Mac drive, and the AMAX Mac partition. These problems have been corrected. Marking unreadable blocks bad - Several problems were corrected and the maximum bad block count was increased to 1000 from 256. Problems repairing bad files and drawers - One major problem was corrected involving deletion of corrupted files. Several minor (cosmetic) changes were made. Reorganization menu changes - A menu-bar item has been added to the Reorganization menu window, permitting the operator to run reorganization in "quiet" mode, so that no operator intervention is required, unless an error occurs. In addition, the wording of the of the reorganization menu window selections has been changed to better reflect the way the program really works. No longer a borderless window - Quarterback Tools windows now have a border, and refresh now preserves the sizing gadget. Gadget images now invert with mouse clicks, so you can tell if you have actually selected a gadget. Tested with Commodore's Enforcer - Tools has been extensively tested with an advanced debugging tool known as Enforcer. Wording changes - Numerous minor wording changes were made in the error messages which appear in different parts of the program. CHANGES IN VERSION 1.2 The memory usage menu item was removed from the volume selection window menu bar, where it caused excessive memory usage under certain conditions. It remains on the Main Menu window menu bar, where it works correctly. Earlier versions of Tools were subject to accidental double-clicking on the reorganization menu gadgets, causing unpredictable results. This has been corrected. Tools now ignores some types of non-standard "drives", such as an AMAX partition. Several problems in RESTORE DELETED FILES have been fixed. These sometimes caused crashes when deleted files were found for which the corresponding parent directory could not be found. FIND AND REPAIR sometimes finds that a hash chain must be sorted. The sorting routine would sometimes crash. Problem corrected. CHANGES IN VERSION 1.1 Under Workbench 1.3.2 and earlier versions, volume reorganization would frequently fail at the completion of the operation, even though the volume was properly reorganized. Problem corrected. Also under Workbench 1.3.2 and earlier versions, Tools would report errors on known good floppy disks. Problem corrected. CRON TIMER We have included on the Tools master disk a public domain timer utility program called CRON which you can use to invoke QBSNAP on a time-of-day basis. The program was not written by us and we will not support it. It is provided as a convenience to you. Use it at your own risk. See CRON documentation on disk for instructions on using it. REBOOT AFTER REORGANIZATION When you reorganize a volume, files and drawers are relocated from their original positions on the volume to more optimum positions. However, AmigaDOS tends to "remember" the old positions, even after the reorganization, leading to some serious problems. As a result, Tools now warns you to reboot your Amiga after reorganizing a volume. This is not really necessary if you reorganize a floppy disk. But after you reorganize the SYS: partition on your hard disk you MUST reboot the Amiga. If you do not, you may end up with a completely scrambled partition. ATTENTION CLtd Kronos controller users: after reorganizing an autoboot partition, you must rerun the SetAutoboot program to properly reset the autoboot pointers on the disk. This step is NOT required for other hard disk controllers or for a partition which is not an autoboot partition. REORGANIZING A FULL VOLUME The Tools manual makes a point that Tools can reorganize a totally full volume. This is true of floppy disks. But for hard disks, Tools needs a few free blocks on the volume to hold reorganization data. Specifically, it needs 0.8% of the capacity of the volume (less than one percent) of free space. If your volume is 99% full, Tools may not be able to reorganize it. The solution is to delete one or more files (or copy them to another volume) to make enough room for the reorganization to proceed. REORGANIZATION INTEGRITY CHECK Some users have wondered why Tools performs a full check of the volume before it reorganizes the data. The reason is this: we want to be certain that there are no unknown physical or logical errors on the volume. Such errors can cause the reorganization to fail. The remainder of your files may then become scrambled or lost, and you would be very unhappy. To avoid all these problems, Tools checks every block and every file of the volume, looking for any sort of trouble. The result is a much more reliable reorganization, even though it takes a little longer to perform. And you may be unpleasantly surprised to learn that there are problems on your volume which you were not aware of. The integrity check is there for a good reason! DELETED FILES AFTER REORGANIZATION After Tools reorganizes a volume, you may find a great many "deleted" files on the volume using the RESTORE LOST AND DELETED FILES function. The files are not missing; they have been copied elsewhere on the volume. But Tools may list these files as available to be restored. In fact, if you try to restore these "remnants", you will find that they are not complete files, and cannot be successfully restored to the current volume or another volume. We are currently examining several methods of "cleaning up" the volume to eliminate this phenomena. MEMORY USAGE The more memory available during reorganization the faster the reorganization will be completed. However, for best all around operation of the program, we normally recommend "medium" memory usage. This leaves a nice cushion of available memory and allows operation of other programs. REPAIRING A BAD VOLUME Here are the steps we recommend for repairing a volume which has known problems. First run FIND AND REPAIR to find and delete files which are corrupted. Then run FIND UNREADABLE BLOCKS to find and mark busy any bad blocks. Then run FIND AND REPAIR again to verify the integrity of the volume. RAM: DEVICE USAGE Quarterback Tools does NOT work with the RAM: device. That device is not a standard AmigaDOS device, and is not recognized by Tools. Of course, there is little reason to use Tools with RAM: anyway! HARD AND SOFT LINKS Commodore has promised a new filing system feature called "links", to be a part of Workbench 2.0. Unfortunately, this new feature is poorly documented, and, as of today, is still not fully implemented. As a result, we chose not to support links, since we would be shooting at a moving target. Tools will support links in a future release, after Commodore completes and releases Workbench 2.0. TOOLS ICONS Quarterback Tools comes with two different icons. The primary icon is one which looks good with the standard Workbench 1.3 colors. The alternate icon is designed to look good under the "new and improved" colors of Workbench 2.0. If you run under WB2.0, you can change to the alternate icon for a better look. Simply copy the icon named: 2.0ToolIcon.info in the icons drawer of the Tools master disk. Be sure to rename the icon to Tools.info. REPORT ICON The report produced by "FIND AND REPAIR" does not have an associated icon. 'PROCEED' VERSUS 'NEXT FILE' Some users have been confused by the choice of 'PROCEED' versus 'NEXT FILE' which appear in the error requester produced by FIND AND REPAIR or FIND BUT DON'T REPAIR when a problem is detected in a file or drawer. The choice of NEXT FILE is really there to take care of the case where a single file has many problems, and you grow tired of hitting what seems to be an endless series of repetitive errors in that same file. NEXT FILE forces Tools to skip any remaining tests on the current file and go immediately to the next file to be processed. Note, however, that this step MAY leave uncorrected problems in the first file, since it won't be fully tested. NON-STANDARD FILE SYSTEMS There are some "non-standard" public domain file systems that let you simulate a floppy file system on a hard drive. These should be removed BEFORE you try to reorganize the hard drive as the results are unpredictable. RESTORING (UNDELETING) FILES Some Tools users have asked why it takes so long to find a file to undelete. Tools was written with the future in mind, mainly the Workbench 2.0 FastFileSystem. The reason that Tools scans the whole partition even if you know the file name you wish to undelete is that under 2.0, the file header can be stored ANYWHERE on that partition. Under the older filesystems, the file header is always stored near the root block, so that a scan of that area of the partition allows the file to be found quickly. The method Tools uses works on all filesystems, but may be slower than some other utilities under Workbench 1.3.2 or earlier versions. AREXX EXAMPLE Here is an AREXX script, courtesy of Charlie Fair, which can be used to run Tools via the Arexx interface. /* starttools.rexx - Starts up Qbtools and reorgs DF0: */ /* Copyright (c) 1990 AmiSoft */ /* To use the Arexx interface, start Quarterback Tools from CLI or from a script. An Arexx program can communicate with Quarterback Tools via the address command: ADDRESS 'QBT_AREXX' Quarterback Tools responds to the following commands and produces the following results: EXIT Terminates Quarterback Tools. VOLUME name Selects volume to process. DRIVE name Selects drive to process. LOAD Loads previously saved options. SAVE Saves options. ABOUT Returns Quarterback Tools version. FRAGMENTATION Performs fragmentation check on selected volume and returns count of fragmented files. REORGANIZE Reorganizes selected volume. MARK Finds and marks bad blocks, and returns count of bad blocks found. FIND Finds volume problems. Returns count and severity. REPAIR Attempts to repair volume problems. FORMAT Formats volume safely. UNFORMAT Attempts to unformat volume. SCREEN mode Sets screen mode to INTERACTIVE, INFORMATIVE, or QUIET. MEMORY usage Sets memory usage to LOW, MEDIUM, or HIGH. OPTIMIZE mode Sets optimization mode to WORKBENCH or CLI. AMIGADOS mode Sets AmigaDOS mode to ENABLED or DISABLED ************************************************************************* */ trace r ADDRESS COMMAND 'run sys:qbt/tools -r' /* Start Tools with rexx option */ say 'QB Tools is now running Rexx, screen controls are now inactive' do 10 while ~show('Ports','QBT_AREXX') end address 'QBT_AREXX' 'OPTIMIZE WORKBENCH' address 'QBT_AREXX' 'DRIVE DF0:' address 'QBT_AREXX' 'REORGANIZE' say 'quiting QBT_AREXX' address 'QBT_AREXX' 'exit' rx 'ADDRESS qbt_arexx "exit"' */ /*this line will exit a run away pgm*/ TESTED SYSTEMS We have tested Tools on the following Amiga systems, among others: Commodore 3000/030 Commodore 2000 Hurricane 030/882, Kronos controller Commodore 1000 Commodore 500 Commodore 2091 Commodore 2090a Commodore RAD: C Ltd. ScsiDos 3.0 C Ltd. Kronos Supra series II v 1.10d *************************************************************************** Don't forget to return your product registration card to us if you want to hear about upgrades to this product or possibly free bug fixes. If we don't hear from you, you won't hear from us! Thanks for your support. George Chamberlain Central Coast Software