◊ This program is distributed as Shareware: if you like it or use it please honor the shareware system by sending $20 to the author at the address above. Since collecting international cheques is very expensive, please send cash only. If you MUST send a cheque, keep in mind that the banks will gobble up more than half of it.
◊ NOTE: Getting some (usually very few) bucks is what you write shareware for, but getting a note, a postcard or anything else is a lot better than getting nothing. I would like to know how far this program has gone, so remember that you can do something nice even if you do not have a couple of $$$ to spare.
(all this disclaimer was shamelessly copied from Alessandro Levi Montalcini’s documentation files… long live cut & paste!)
• THE TALE
Disk Charmer was born in the early 1989, when I started accumulating bad floppies, which could not even be formatted as single-sided. Even WC-DOS computers (I bet you know what I mean) could exclude bad sectors from disks. Nobody else (at that time) had been able to do that on the Mac, so I was tempted to start trying myself. When I succeeded in doing that, I regretted I was not living in the States, so that my utility could be shared by a vast number of users. Worse, I had to leave for the 1-year compulsory military service we have here in Italy, so developing further on Disk Charmer was nearly impossible until the end of 1990. In the meantime the growing Macintosh software market included a number of utilities able to lock out bad sectors. Then (after a while) System 7 came. As you probably know, System 7 automatically locks out bad sectors. So I slightly modified Disk Charmer to accommodate for it, and supplied Balloon Help.
• INSIGHT
Let me now describe in detail how you can use Disk Charmer effectively. As you can see, launching Disk Charmer brings up a modal dialog box. Brand-new floppy disks will be formatted on insertion. You will be warned if you insert a formatted disk. I will not bore you with a description of every single button, because I have thoroughly implemented it using Balloon Help™. Let me tell you the "not-so-obvious".
First of all, the differences between System ante-7 (Disk Charmer works even under System 4.3) and 7, and its clever adapting behavior.
If you start with a System older than 7.0, Disk Charmer will, by default, follow these steps: format, erase, verify; if verifying fails, it begins testing the disk, keeping track of bad sectors. Under System 7.0 or later, it will do only format and erase, because Apple modified the erasing process by adding verifying and locking out (so that further steps are unnecessary).
My integrity test includes writing and read-verifying onto all the disk surface, and checking for retry errors, too. Most commercial packages do not check for retry errors, nor write. I have experienced that some disks with bad sectors work correctly when read from, but fail when written to. Sometimes they work well in both reading and writing, but "under the hood" retry errors are occurring (so that data loss is in YOUR very near future).
By the way: the progress bar you can see in the main dialog (and beeps on bad sectors) works only while MY tests are running (not Apple’s). So if your Mac is running under System 7 with the default settings, the progress bar remains grayed.
I exclude bad spots by simply telling the system they are busy. Most implementations (of commercial utilities) create invisible files containing the bad sectors. I don't like these implementations because they waste directory space, and leave behind files that may confuse unexperienced users. They have the advantage, though, that Disk First Aid and all that bunch of utilities checking disk directories do not report errors in the directory structure. The best implementation is the Apple one: it updates correctly the directory without creating a file. Apple disk tests are also very thorough; besides, they exclude the entire track containing the bad sector, while my “locking out” implementation touches only the bad boy, and they mark the disk in a special way as bad, so that applications can check if a disk is a bad one or not. There is one pitfall with Apple’s implementation: it treats errors on the boot blocks as fatal (that is, it tells you “Initialization Failed!”), so that you cannot use the floppy even if you don’t intend to use it as a startup disk.
With Disk Charmer you can even gain a few KBytes of space using the “Big Disks” setting (precisely, 9K on 800K floppies, 19K on 1,4M). This is accomplished by reducing directory space. Do not place a lot of files on "Big Disks", otherwise the directory will grow, scattered all over your disk. Keep only one or a few more files on a “Big Disk” (a Compact Pro archive segment, for instance).
A note regarding the Finder 7.0: this stupid guy has an interesting bug. You can experience it by simply inserting an unlocked disk, opening/moving a window belonging to it, then trying to eject it (using the Eject Disk command from the menus). The Finder will gently eject your disk, then not-so-gently ask for it after one second. I tell you this because if you give to Disk Charmer a never-formatted disk, it will be (obviously) formatted, ejected, and re-asked for. Don’t be surprised. The Finder bug is reclaiming for it. Press Command-Period and think “Thanks, Apple” (or yell).
1.4.5 note: the Finder bug has been corrected in System 7.1, but the problem with Disk Charmer still persists. The conflict seems to be with the Finder (not the System), because it does not occur if you use At Ease™.
Disk Charmer can be launched multiple times in a networking environment.
• DISCLAIMER
“No warranties at all, either express or implied…” “All trademarks are held by their respective owners…” and all that stuff.
• WARRANTIES
There are absolutely no warranties (what did you expect?). This piece of software is quite quite stable (years of refining…) so you can firmly trust it. Again, there are no warranties (either express or implied and so on).
• THANKS TO:
◊ Alessandro Levi Montalcini, who suggested to let the user choose “To beep or not to beep” when a bad sector is encountered. He gave me a lot of suggestions (most of them are not implemented yet, though).
◊ Alberto Ricci, for other suggestions and support.
◊ Federico Cavaglià, for patient and impatient beta-testing and a long list of things, too long to be summarized here (he rightfully calls me “the sloppy programmer”).
I hope you enjoy Disk Charmer. If you enjoy it, enjoy it again, but please pay the shareware fee.
The Italian version is available on demand (if you pay the shareware fee, you can get both versions).
For errors, suggestions, and others send e-mail to Fabrizio.Oddone%bbs@osra.sublink.org
