------------------------------- FAT Tools Version 5.0 Help File ------------------------------- (c)Wes Gilster wesg@netins.net Information for programs: * All programs were completely designed and programmed by Wes Gilster, including the GUI interface. * Please send any bug reports or program suggestions to Wes Gilster Email address Wesg@netins.net with a subject of 'FAT Tools Bug.' I will fix all bugs as promtly as possible and take all program suggestions seriously. * I assume no responsibility for the actions or the result of using any of these programs, they are provided as is with no warrenty or technical support. * WARNING: These programs assume you know what you are doing, and do not ask: 'Are you sure you want to do this?' * It is possible to abort out of any of these programs at any time, by pressing CTRL+BREAK. * Whenever the cursor is displayed, the program is working and it is not possible to enter user input. * The only way to insert,add or delete bytes is to click on the appropriate byte, there is no keyboard key. KNOWN PROBLEMS: * At this point error checking is minimal to attain peek performance, future versions may have more error checking. * Changing directories in a file dialog box is not possible, but will be implemented in future versions. --- DISKCOPY: This program is used to accomplish four tasks; copying hard/floppy disks to other disk, copying sectors of one drive to sectors on other drives, copying sectors of a drive to a file, or copying a file to sectors on a drive. Remember one inherent problem when copying sectors of a drive to a file on the same drive, a file could become a repetetive loop of bytes if the sectors being copied belong to the file being saved, this problem could also happen when restoring sectors from a file to the same drive. The OS has no idea that sectors are being read/written, because locks in any OS are put on at the file level not the sector level. The best idea is to save the file onto a different drive to thwart this problem, of course if you are just backing up your DOS boot record or partition table this can never be a problem. KNOWN PROBLEMS: (none) COMMAND LINE PARAMETERS: (none) --- SDISK: This application is a sector editing and viewing program. Sdisk can use all 256 ASCII characters to edit a sector on a hard drive. Sdisk comunicates with hard drives at the lowest possible level (INT 13). Many programs don't have the ability to comunicate at this level and as a consequence cannot view the FAT, Partition information or DOS boot records. Although some areas of the hard drive are protected by Windows 95, for instance the partition table, it is possible to run Sdisk in DOS mode to have complete access to this areas. If this program is run under Windows 95, Sdisk can copy a sector to the Win95 clipboard. To retrieve the data, null terminated strings cannot be used. This is because a hard drive sector can contain the ASCII character #0, which is the null termination character. Sdisk saves information one sector at a time and is convenient for small changes to sectors. For bulk sector moves, Diskcopy is optimized for much better performance. KNOWN PROBLEMS: Viewing information for an extended partition results with unreliable information. No fix is possible until more information is aquired. COMMAND LINE PARAMETERS: (none) --- COMPARE: This program takes two files and does a binary compare on their bytes and creates a COMPARE.LOG file in the current directory. This program is handy for comparing two sector files that were created by Diskcopy. KNOWN PROBLEMS: (none) COMMAND LINE PARAMETERS: compare [filepath1] [filepath2] filepath1 = the file name and path of the first compare file. filepath2 = the file name and path of the second compare file. NOTE: If these parameters are not specified the program will prompt for the names of the files to compare. --- SPAN: This application takes a file that has more bytes than what can fit on the A: drive of a machine and spans it on multiple disks. The program changes the label of the drive to signify which disk is the last disk of the set. This means that you only have to use one disk to transfer between computers, regardless of the size of the file. Simply start the span on one computer, when one disk is finished start the unspan on another computer with the disk you started with and continue from there. KNOWN PROBLEMS: If the last part of the file fits exactly on the last disk, then the unspan thinks there is another disk to unspan after the final disk. a fix will be out with the next version of the program. COMMAND LINE PARAMETERS: span filepath1 filepath1 = filepath1 is the name and path to the file to span across the a: drive. NOTE: filepath1 is a required parameter. --- EVIEW: This program will edit, view and search any file. This program will also view executable information for the current file that is loaded. Files can be edited with all 256 ASCII characters by changing, adding or deleting bytes. It is also possible to search a file using a search string that can also be made up of all ASCII characters. Bytes in the file are shown 256 bytes at a time in Hexadecimal and ASCII. KNOWN PROBLEMS: (none) COMMAND LINE PARAMETERS: eview [filepath1] filepath1 = filepath1 is the name and path of the file that will automatically load.