SKID ROW presents Quarterback Tools V1.3e March 14, 1991 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!!! **************************************************************************** Changes in V1.3e We found and fixed a problem which affected reorganization of non-floppy partitions which are 99% full. We also corrected a problem with long path names and file names overwriting the window's right margin. 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. 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 map out 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 (and AmigaDOS) 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. However, you should only change the high cylinder parameter if you know what you are doing. YOU MUST REFORMAT THE DRIVE FOLLOWING SUCH A CHANGE. THIS WILL CAUSE ALL DATA ON THE DRIVE TO BE LOST. BE CERTAIN YOU BACKUP ALL FILES BEFORE ATTEMPTING SUCH A CHANGE!!! 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. 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. 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