CheckDisk 1.0

Short:        A simple utility to check your disks
Author:       Pavel Fedin <sonic_amiga@rambler.ru>
Uploader:     Pavel Fedin <sonic_amiga rambler ru>
Type:         disk/misc
Version:      1.0
Replaces:     CheckDisk.lha
Requires:     AmigaOS v3.0+
Architecture: m68k-amigaos

 1. BACKGROUND

 One day one of my clients brought be two IDE HDDs and asked to diagnose them.
They were working on PC and some bad blocks were on them. I connected them to
my A1200 and started "Check Drive" operation of HDInstTools program. It did not
find any defects on both drives. This was suspicious. I tried the same
operation on my Pentium-200 and it found many bad blocks on them. I was
surprised. Then i tried to use old HDToolBox from OS3.1 disks (unfortunately i
did not find this operation in OS3.5 HDToolBox at all). It showed no bad blocks
too.
 So i came to a conclusion that those programs use some method which works only
on scsi drives. And i decided to write my own disk checker. That's how
CheckDisk was born.

 2. INSTALLATION

 No special installation procedure is needed. Just copy CheckDisk program to
everywhere you want, for example to C: directory.

 3. USAGE

 It is very easy to use this program. Just go to CLI and enter:
CheckDisk <device name> <unit number>. As you see, it works with physical, not
logical devices. So it will check the whole hard drive, not only one partition.
The usage of this program is not limited to hard drives only. You can use it on
everything: ZIP disks, CD disks, even floppies.
 For example: "CheckDisk scsi.device 0" will check your primary master hard
drive.
 After startup this program tells you about the geometry of your drive and
starts checking. It checks the drive by sequentally reading all sectors on the
media from 0 to last sector. If CheckDisk encounters a bad block it will report
about it. At the end of operation it will also display summary amount of bad
blocks on the drive.
 At any time you can interrupt the program by pressing CTRL-C on the keyboard.
 The program is compatible with modern drives (large HDDs, DVDs, etc) with
media size greater than 4 GB. If it detects that the media is large enough it
will use trackdisk64 standard to access the device. Of course, your device
driver must support this standard. But it usually does if you use such device.

 4. RE-COMPILING

 To recompile CheckDisk from the supplied source code you'll need modern
version of include:utility/utility_lib.i file. The file supplied with SAS/C is
old and does not contain UMult64 function definition. You can generate a new
file from FD file with FD2Pragma utility, which you can find on Aminet.

 5. HISTORY

 V 1.0 - initial release.

 6. FUTURE

 Of course such an utility should be more user-friendly. It should have a nice
GUI with drive map display (like in micro$oft ScanDisk for DOS or Norton
Utilities). Also probably it should be more advanced to be able to edit
partition tabled in different formats (at least Amiga and PC native) and even
to re-partition drives without destroying data on them (like PartitionMagic for
Windows). But, in this case it will be quite another program with another name.
But i don't know when i will do it. Currently i have many projects and no time.
This program was written very quickly (in tho evenings, 3 hours per each). So
please don't bomb me with enhancement requests.

 7. DISTRIBUTION

 This program is absolutely freeware. I include its source code with it, you
are free to use it as you wish.

 8. AUTHOR

 My name is Pavel Fedin, i live in Moscow, and my E-Mail is:
sonic_amiga@rambler.ru. You are free to leave comments and bug reports.