************************************************************************** - THE LEGENDARY >> SUBSOFTWARE << IN 90 !!! =========================================== - CONTACT US - BP: 36 - - 1380 REBECK - - BELGIUM - - DON'T SEND ANY DISKS - ************************************************************************** B.A.D. v3.1 11/1/88 (Blitz A Disk) B.A.D. Copyright 1988 by Mark Hellman & Reid Bishop Fast Disk Formats Copyright 1988 by Mark Hellman ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ------------------------------------------------------------------- *** NOTICE *** M.V. Micro makes no warranties either expressed or implied, with respect to the software contained on this disk, it's quality, performance, merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose. This software is licensed "as is." The entire risk as to the quality and performance of the software is with the buyer. In no event will M.V. Micro be liable for direct, indirect, incidental or consequential damages resulting from any defect in the software even if they have been advised of the possibility of such damages. Some states do not allow the inclusion or limitation of implied warranties or liabilities for incidental or consequential damages, so the above limitation or exclusion may not apply to you. M.V. Micro reserves the right to make improvements in the software contained on this disk at any time and without notice. -------------------------------------------------------------------- PLEASE... I spent almost every spare hour ( and some not so spare ) for more than 6 months writing this software ( I think my wife was starting to wear black! ). I also have many more utilities yet to write and a game. However if the developers are not supported, and rewarded for their effort ( it takes A LOT! ) there will be no developers and no computers. SPREAD THE WORD, NOT THE DISK!!! COPY PROTECTION: ---------------- Well there is none, just YOUR honor, However... EACH copy of BAD is serialized. This number is encrypted and there is no internal access to it. REWARD!!! Information resulting in Legal action against anyone providing unauthorized copies of the copyrighted material on this disk will recieve a $40.00 reward. OK, nuff Said, now the Docs... B.A.D. GENERAL: --------------- It is a shame that a computer as advanced as the Amiga was destined to receive such a poor filing system. Most users will agree that our floppies perform most lethargically, and hard drives are unnecessarily throttled back by what we all know as AmigaDOS. Due to the quirks of the filing system, most AmigaDos disks tend to become disorganized and highly fragmented after repeated use. Even after formatting a disk and doing a fresh filecopy (or restore operation for hard drives) we are left with only a marginal increase in speed. Your purchase of B.A.D will now introduce you to the performance these disks are really capable of. Not only will you find this utility a joy to use, but indispensable once you become accustomed to your newly gained speed on all your disks. B.A.D. was designed to perform one function- to restructure, organize, and optimize your AmigaDOS disks to 100% performance levels. No tricks or magic are employed to attain this performance- the resulting disks are no different from any other AmigaDos disk other than their impressive speed. Use B.A.D. in the "hard-drive mode" to restore maximum performance and speed. If you have your hard drive partitioned, then BAD may be used on any individual partition. B.A.D. also will process virtual drives (i.e. a virtual AmigaDos disk imbedded on an IBM drive and accessed through the bridgeboard.) Use B.A.D. in the "floppy-mode" to process your floppy disks. This requires 2 drives and at least 370K of free, contiguous ram. B.A.D. was written for fast processing of floppy disks, and thus is an excellent substitute for the diskcopy program. (We never use diskcopy anymore.. only B.A.D.!) Should you only have one floppy drive, you may still process your disks- more on how to do this later. The speed increase afforded by your newly processed disks is permanent- and requires NO EXTRA RAM such as cache-based systems. As you write, delete, move, etc... files around on your disks you will notice the blitz slowly "go away". This is normal and is caused by the erratic way that DOS writes data to the disk. Occasionally you may wish to re-blitz the disk to once again reach maximum speed. Workbench Info: --------------- There are several different modes of operation that allow you to process the disk so it is optimized for the type of environment that the disk will be normally used in. These are discussed in a later section. I would first like to discuss some strange things that Workbench has a habit of doing that you may not have noticed before. This will become very noticeable after a disk has been processed. No doubt you have noticed the .info files that WorkBench creates in every directory that it has access to. This is Workbench's way of speeding up it's access to the .info files it uses for icons. When something happens behind it's back, such as adding a file to a drawer, WorkBench will read in the entire directory and then rewrite it's .info file for that directory. This type of access is MUCH slower than normal, and can be expected to happen the FIRST time a directory is accessed if something has changed- such as after it has been processed by BAD. It should be noted that some other things can also cause this to happen and make it APPEAR like the Blitz has "Gone Away". Here are the known causes, if you identify another one please let me know so I can add it to this list. 1) You access the disk from a different version of WorkBench. This different version will rewrite the .info file with its' version number. 2) The System Clock is set to some time BEFORE The date stamp on the disk. Got Me on this one??? 3) If you are using the new FFS, WorkBench will ALWAYS read the ENTIRE ROOT directory and update the .info file!!! This appears to be an incompatibility between the FFS and WorkBench, it's a real shame that this bug was overlooked on the official release of v1.3, your only choice is to keep the number of files and directories small in the root and put everything in sub-directories if you want maximum speed. Should you notice this happening EVERY time you open your drawers, check to see that the disk is write-enabled. This allows Workbench to re-write the .info file, thus bringing back the original blitz. This is required only ONCE- you may then once again write-protect the disk. -------------------------------------------------------------------- ***** BAD USAGE ***** Floppy processing: ------------------ B.A.D may be run from either the CLI or WorkBench. Once you run it, you will need to set up the program to perform the desired function. B.A.D. loads up set for floppy-disk processing in the WorkBench mode, with DF0: selected as the source and DF1: selected as the destination if present else DF0: is selected. You may change the source or destination drive by clicking on the appropriate gadget. The source drive will be the disk you wish to process, and the destination drive is the drive to which the processed disk is to be written. The source disk is not written to at all- you may leave it write protected. In the destination drive you may place either a formatted or non-formatted disk. B.A.D. will detect a non-formatted disk and format the disk on the fly as it processes it. As in the diskcopy program, B.A.D. does not verify that the destination disk was properly written out, thus make sure that you use a quality disk to avoid trouble. Once the drives have been selected, you must then decide which mode you wish the disk to be processed in- either WorkBench mode or CLI mode. The differences between these two modes are as follows: WorkBench Mode- The entire disk, including all directories, files, and data will be processed with special preference given to all files ending with the .info extension- i.e. icon files. In this mode all WorkBench operations will be dramatically sped up. Windows will open very fast, icons will seemingly blaze onto the screen, and performance will generally rival speeds found only on hard drives. Disk thrashing when opening windows will be non-existent! This mode is designed for those disks that generally are used with WorkBench. CLI Mode- Once again, the entire disk including all directories, files, and data will be processed, with special attention given to keeping CLI access quite fast. CLI users will appreciate this mode, as issuing the 'Dir', 'List', etc. commands will present very fast output, with no 'disk-thrashing' whatsoever. WorkBench operations will perform about the same as a non-processed disk. Once again,you should see CLI performance quite close to that of a hard drive. Once you have set these parameters, simply insert the disks into the drives, and click on the 'Blitz' gadget. B.A.D. will proceed to process the disk according to your setup parameters. Expect processing times of 2-5 minutes depending on how full the disk is. When completed, you will have an copy of your original disk in the destination drive, identical in every way except for it's speed and smoothness. As noted above, you should open all windows the first time with the write-protect set in the write enable mode so that WorkBench may re-write it's updated .info files. After this is done the disk may then be write protected. We are somewhat confused by this odd behaviour in WorkBench, but obviously we cannot control a system function. For those who have only one drive, you may still process your floppies. Simply select DF0: as both your Source and Destination drive. B.A.D. will process the disk IN PLACE, thus you should make a copy of it in case something goes haywire while processing it. This method of processing takes longer, as there is no destination disk to write to. Expect processing times of around 30-45 minutes for a full disk, with faster times for disks not yet filled. Hard Disk processing: --------------------- To process your hard drives, click on the HD-FLOPPY gadget. A display of all your mounted partitions will be shown. Select the partition or drive you wish to process by clicking on the appropriate gadget. Select the desired mode, as explained above, and you are ready to go. Click on the 'Blitz' gadget and B.A.D. will proceed to process the drive according to the parameters you selected. Note that you will NOT be able to access this partition or drive while it is being processed. Processing times are difficult to predict, but expect a standard 65ms drive to take 30-45 minutes for every 10 megs that you are using on the drive. This is a dramatic improvement over the first releases of B.A.D., which took 1-2 hours to process the same amount. When completed, AmigaDos will automatically load in the disk-validator to re-validate the drive. Please note that this validation may take up to 15 minutes for some drives, so allow the validator to finish before you try to access the drive at all. The results of processing hard drives are most pleasing. You will find the drive to operate much faster in all areas, while head thrashing will now be nearly eliminated. Not only will seeks be reduced, but you will actually reduce wear and tear on your drive as it does not have to jump all over the place to find what it needs. Access speeds will now rival that of a RAM DISK!! This is especially true of WorkBench operations. You will find that when opening WorkBench windows, the drive light will only blip a few times- thus the drive is feeding DOS the information as fast as it will digest it. We feel that once you process your drive, you will never want to be without this added speed and smoothness. It can become quite addictive!! TECHNICAL NOTES: 1) Memory requirements: For processing floppies using 2 drives, a minimum of 370K of free ram is required. For those with only 512K machines, this requires you not to have any tasks running other than WorkBench, nor should you have any buffers allocated to your drives. This may seem like stiff requirements, but results in fast processing times. Should you still have difficulty, boot the machine without loading WorkBench. We have tested the program extensively and it WILL run on a 512K machine after loading WorkBench, so check your startup-sequence if you still have trouble. For processing hard disks or a floppy in the single drive mode, here are the general guidelines: For every Meg of disk capacity, count on using about 24K of ram. This means a 20 meg drive will require at least 470K of free, contiguous ram, plus the ram required to load B.A.D. Amiga 2000 owners take note, the 2000 comes with 1meg of ram which is contiguous HOWEVER under the current operating system this ram is split into two 512k chunks to accomodate the 512k chip ram limitations of the current chip set. This means that the largest chunk available is normaly less than 512k! 2) The disk you are processing MUST be error-free. B.A.D. will not process copy protected floppies, nor will it like a hard drive that has several read-write errors. Depending on the error, you could end up with one or two files that are damaged, or they may snowball into a rash of problems. A good way to find if your drive has any errors is to back it up. Anything that cannot be backed should be deleted before processing the drive. Should B.A.D encounter any driver errors while processing, the error type and block location will be output to RAM:BADMESS so that you may determine what area of the drive has a possible error condition. B.A.D. will notify you upon completion if any errors were encountered, thus you should read the error report and jot down the information it gives you. 3) Due to the nature of this program, there is NO ABORT feature. B.A.D. MUST be allowed to complete the process of a disk. Should you warm boot the machine while it is running, or GURU, then your disk will more than likely be a complete mess, with the obvious consequences. TAKE HEED!!!! 4) When processing your system disk or partition, it might be a good idea to assign your L: directory to another disk. This is so that AmigaDos can find the disk-validator program which is necessary after completing the process. If you have the L: assigned to the disk that you are processing, AmigaDos will not be able to locate it and a warm boot will be necessary to validate the disk. *** FOR THE LATEST UPDATE INFO PLEASE READ THE `VERSION x.x' FILE *** ----------------------------------------------------------------------- CREDITS: I would like to thank Reid Bishop for his uncanny ability to find bugs and problems that slipped by me, and his unending devotion to the cause. Also for his effort in writing the CheckSum Fixer. He is also the Co-Author of B.A.D. UPDATE INFO: ----------- You MUST send in the registration card provided... this is the only way that we may service you and provide updates. Send us your original disk and $5.00 for handling and mailing. Please do NOT send your disk in unless we notify you of a newer release because if you do, we will keep your disk until there is a new version. FUTURE ENHANCEMENTS: -------------------- Currently in the works: Bad sector mapping, Disk Integrity checking, and a HD Back-up program that will knock your sox off ( Tape Drive Support! ). ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Happy Blitzing! Mark Hellman P.O. Box 1112 Wheatridge, CO 80034-1112 (303) 467-1718 voice We also have a 24 hr support BBS for B.A.D. customers. This BBS has a separate section set-up for BAD customers so that you may find out about future upgrades and additions to the programs. If you have any questions or problems, feel free to call this #... (303) 469-9862 Use this name- BAD Use this password- FastDisks You will then be introduced to the BAD sections of the BBS and may leave FeedBack with the Sysop. ONLY customers who send in their registration cards will receive full support thru the BBS. Send em in folks! There is more to come...