First off, please understand that this is not a final version of the program. Crashes still do happen and there are ways to confuse it. Not all features are implemented. I would very much hearing about problems you have with it, so I can get them taken care of before putting out a release version.
G E N E R A L N O T E S
The program is free. Totally free. Give it out, include it when you sell your used computer, put it on public archives and servers, whatever. Just don't charge anyone for it, or charge anyone for you to use it. If you are some sort of bureau that does disk recoveries, you can't make someone pay for the time you spend using Flut. Just give them a copy if you haven't the heart to do it for free. And maybe start going to church or something.
At first I was going to attempt a one-click automatic disk-fixing program, but I decided that a semi-versatile tool would be more useful to more people in the long run. Hopefully a good balance will be struck between simplicity and power.
Flut does not deal well with 400K disks. Also, it makes no effort to support 400K disk drives. So few people have and use these (and I don't even have access to the drives to test it) that it doesn't seem worth the effort. If you're one of the people who does, I apologize and I don't mean to sound condescending. But you're out of luck.
Generally, Flut will not write to your original, damaged disk (the exception to this is the sector editor. So don't use the 'write' command unless you know what you're doing). This is so that if Flut doesn't fix it, at least it won't be more screwed up than when you started. No disk utility is perfect, but the ones that are the farthest from perfect are those that are so confident they assume they will never go wrong. They will. The side effect of this is that for some functions, you need to have two floppy drives. Things like disk-disk copy will only work with two drives, for instance (for now).
I don't make any guarantee that Flut will fix any given disk problem or perfectly recover any given file. But it is enough to get most files most of the time, which is better than nothing, but hey, it's free.
There are those who will tell you that the program is so named because it's a catchy abbreviation for Floppy Utility. That's not true. I'm not smart enough to think of that. I had typed the "Fl" of floppy but I couldn't come up with a good name for it so I just poked a couple of keys.
I have no idea whether block 2 is called the "Master directory block" or the "Volume information block" or something entirely different. Therefore these terms are used interchangeably, along with various hybrids, throughout this documentation. Anyway, it's the place where the system stores lots of valuable information about the rest of the disk, and it's also the place that is most often damaged.
H O W T O U S E F L U T
BASIC STRATEGIES:
First, run the program and stick in the disk. If you get a dialog box with an error message, that is what the Macintosh System reported as its problem when it tried to read the disk. If you didn't get an error message, the disk is mountable on your Mac. That doesn't mean there aren't bad sectors in files you need or the directory isn't corrupted. The way Flut reads the directory is probably a bit more robust than how the System does, so you may be able to access "lost" files that don't show up from the Finder.
If you just need a few files, try to copy them using the command on the "Files" menu, which is activated once you have selected "Manipulate Files" from the disk menu. Copy the files to your hard drive or another floppy.
Sometimes there will be disk errors in the middle of the files and the copies will refuse to open or will crash their applications. If they are word processing files (or other textual material), the Extract Text command will pull out only the ASCII characters from the file, giving you something any word processor can handle. This means you will lose your formatting (boldface, margins, etc.) and the order of the materal may be a little screwed up, but it's certainly better than nothing.
If you have a file from a non-text-based application (e.g., a spreadsheet or drawing program) and it is corrupted to the point where the application will not open it, you may have to find an expert. Some programs provide mechanisms for extracting data from damaged files: PageMaker will sometimes let you "Place" pages from a file it will not open, and the syntax in Excel to reference cells in another worksheet (look at the formulas you get when you "Paste Link") will often let you read data from an otherwise inaccessible file.
If you need the entire disk back, you should try making a copy of it using the Duplicate command (see below). If this fails to produce a viable (mountable) disk, you will probably need to extract your files individually. If the Manipulate Files command fails to see the files you think are on your disk, it's time to take harsher measures. Unfortunately, I'm not providing you the means to do this; you'll have to spend a few dollars (or learn to hack around HFS in the sector editor - take a look at Inside Macintosh II and IV, Rick Grehan's article starting on page 330 of the June 1989 Byte Magazine, and the "Norton Disk Companion for the Macintosh" book you get when you buy Norton Utilities). I'd recommend Norton Utilities, with SUM and 1st Aid HFS tying for second, and MacTools a distant and pathetic, embarassing, whining, shameful last.
MENU COMMANDS:
Disk: Duplicate Disk:
7 times out of 10, you can deal with an "unreadable" disk simply by making a copy of it. If a straight copy doesn't work, try the "use backup master directory block" option if it's available (it won't be if the backup MDB is unreadable). If that option is already checked when you get the Duplicate dialog, you should definitely go with it since that means the regular one is unreadable. After you make the copy, use the Finder to copy the files to yet another disk (or your hard drive) in case the directory structure is flaky.
Copying onto a 1.44M disk is currently very slow. I am not sure why this is, but the writing seems to take forever. This should be dealt with soon.
Disk: Verify Disk:
This option is most useful if you have Report Windows turned on, so you can see what the specific errors were on each problem sector. William Pietri promises to re-write the display so it's actually shaped like a disk and the error indications are anatomically correct. Let's see if he does.
If you are getting huge numbers of errors clustered together, you should check the disk for physical damage. If there is sticky crud on it, don't put it back in any drive and run a cleaning kit through the drive it was just in. Likewise, if there's a perforation or bad dent in the disk, you probably don't want it spinning past your drive heads. Come to think of it, you should always inspect suspect disks BEFORE putting them in your computer.
Disk: Format Disk:
I have no idea why you would want to make a 720K Mac disk, but you can if you want. It requires that you have a SuperDrive or FDHD or whatever Apple is calling their high density floppy drives these days. The only useful thing I can imagine is that these disks can be read by IBM and compatible disk drives. Maybe you'll find something neat you can do with that. If you do, let me know. It may be interesting to you to know that DOS and Mac high-density disks are formatted pretty much exactly the same (formatted, not initialized). It thrilled me to pieces.
If you format a disk with no file system, the Mac will report that it's not a Macintosh disk because it is in fact totally blank ($00's on low density disks, $F6's on high-density disks). Again, I'm not really sure what this would be useful for but I bet it's good for something.
Disk: Eject Disk:
Sometimes ejecting a 400K disk will fail to unmount it. When this happens, you will have to quit the program before it will accept different disks in that drive; it will keep reporting that you have somehow unauthorizedly removed a disk. This is stupid, I know, and I am trying to fix it.
Disk: Analyze Disk:
This information is totally un-exciting. One day there will be some real structure consistency checks and other good things you pay Symantec for.
Disk: Manipulate Files:
You can only work with the first 150 files it finds on the disk. The limitation is somewhat arbitrary; I had to decide how much space to allocate before starting because there's no efficient way to decide as it goes. So if it's a problem, let me know and you can get your own special version that handles more files.
Also, there can only be one file manipulation window open at a time. If you select a different disk and choose Manipulate Files, it will just bring the already open window to the front and you will need to close it before working with files on a different disk. This is the same space allocation thing - it takes a lot of memory to keep track of a disk's directory when you're as lousy a programmer as I am.
The hierarchial display is generally correct, but the order of files within each folder can be a little weird. One day it may be alphabetical, but for now it is an artifact of doing a couple quicksorts and other strange manipulations. Sorry about that.
Disk: Unmount Disk:
Sector editing the directory or other system-maintained information on a currently mounted disk is like working with live high-voltage electricity. Okay, well, not quite that bad. But if you change information in these structures and then allow the Finder to unmount the disk, it will re-write some of its own idea of what should be there, resulting in a scrambled mess. So it's a good idea to unmount any volume before doing high-powered sector editing.
Unmounted disks are ejected when you quit from Flut.
Disk: Print:
This isn't enabled yet, but I'm pretty excited about the day when it is. Hope you are too.
Sector: Edit Sectors:
Use the Tab key to switch quickly back and forth between Hex and ASCII entry. You can also click in one or the other field to switch. The Home and End keys work to go to the beginning and end of the sector. Page Up and Page Down let you go from sector to sector. Return lets you read a specific sector. Return twice goes back to sector zero.
Sector: Copy Sector to Buffer
This places a copy of the current sector into a special 512-byte buffer. You can later use the next menu item, "Copy Buffer to window," to replace whatever sector is showing with what you earlier placed in the buffer. Does that make sense? If you wanted to copy sector 541 of one disk to sector 12 of another disk, you could sector edit the first disk, read sector 541, copy it to the buffer, then sector edit the second disk, go to sector 12, copy the buffer to the window, then write the sector out to the second disk.
Sector: Find
If you absolutely can't find a file using any other methods, you can try to track its data down by using "Find" and searching for a bit of data you know to be in that file. You can also quickly confirm that a given bit of data no longer exists on the disk before going to great lengths to find it with other methods.
Right now the find command doesn't find strings that lie across sector boundaries (i.e., things which start at the end of one sector and conclude in the next). This should be fixed soon.
Files: Get Info:
In addition to the more mundane file information, this command will tell you which disk sectors a file's resource and data forks sit on. And they do sit.
Files: View Text:
Like Extract Text, this only pulls out standard ASCII characters (i.e., none of the option-key stuff). So if you have a document with foreign language characters or curly quotes or so, they will disappear. I will probably eventually come up with a better answer to this if I can think of a way to do it without sacrificing too much speed.
Files: Extract Text:
The default file creator for extracted text files is 'MSWD'. This means that if you double-click on an extracted text file, it will try to launch Microsoft Word. I assume all right-minded people use Word for their text editing, but if you really want to change it, it's stored in DITL resource -3999, item 10 (in Flut, not the System file). If you "Save All", then all subsequent files will be named "Text of" whatever they were before, no matter what name you typed in the dialog. You can extract text files to the original disk (though I don't recommend it), but then you should close the directory window and re-open it, since it will be inconsistent.
Files: Copy:
Right now, copying files doesn't preserve their logical length; they end up being rounded up to the nearest sector boundary. This is probably going to make trouble for something (though it hasn't for anything I've tried thus far) so it will be changed eventually. And you'll be the first to know when it is. You can copy files back to the original disk (though I don't recommend it), but then you should close the directory window and re-open it, since it will have become inconsistent.
Note that if you "Save All", any files in the destination directory with names the same as files being copied will automatically be overwritten. This is probably not a good thing and I will eventually be changing it.
B U G S & C H A N G E S
Version .87 (Jan18/92)
Added one-drive copy feature. There's a bit of an updating problem, but it does work.
Fixed minor bug in detecting write protection when formatting.
Ate a tasty chicken sandwich.
Tried out a new icon for size. Sure enough, it's about 32 x 32 pixels.
Version .86 (Jan15/92)
Abandoned the version names and went back to numbers so it would be easy to tell which version was the most recent.
Fixed a glaring bug in previous versions which caused copy and text extract to read the wrong sectors past the first three extents for files on very fragmented disks.
Version "Allan" (Jan02/92)
Some bugs:
If a disk's catalog tree is so long that it spills over to extents listed as file #4 in the extents tree, that part is ignored. As a result, on disks with an awful lot of files (over 100 or so), some of them may not show up in the "Manipulate files" dialog.
Window updating isn't always perfect. If I had any grasp of how it really worked there probably wouldn't be this problem.
Changes made to directory information in the Files: Info dialog aren't saved.
It crashes on the _StripAddress trap sometimes and I have absolutely no idea why. These crashes are almost never reproducible. I hate them.
T O D O L I S T
one-drive copy
sector tag scavenging
sector editor should show allocation status and byte position
M I S C E L L A N E O U S
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
Robert Churchill answered all my dumb questions, and called me Padre.
Bruce Burrell is the Information Man.
William Pietri complained about every single aspect of the program until I changed it.
Joe Klein did too. But he maintains I haven't used any of his suggestions.
Allan Bjorklund made it crash every time I thought I had it right.
Swati Agrawal called me a geek for working on the program and laughed at it even when it saved her stupid disk.
Dave Koziol asked to be listed in the acknowledgements.
TELL ME ABOUT BUGS:
The best way to contact me is via electronic mail. Write to mnc@umich.edu. If that fails, write to mnc@css.itd.umich.edu. If that fails, write to me c/o 515 Catherine St., Ann Arbor MI 48104, USA. I want to hear about what you can do to make the program crash. If there's a feature it should have but doesn't, tell me about it.
If you feel like sending someone money, don't send it to me; I won't even be in the country. Instead, send it to Handgun Control, Inc., P.O. Box 37345, Washington, DC 20077-4458. If you don't approve, give it to some orphans.
