Path: kernighan.cs.umass.edu!barrett From: markus@tiger.teuto.de (Markus Illenseer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: RDB-Salv Version 1.1 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.applications Date: 8 Jul 1996 14:54:47 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 411 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <4rr7fn$mn4@kernighan.cs.umass.edu> Reply-To: markus@tiger.teuto.de (Markus Illenseer) NNTP-Posting-Host: knots.cs.umass.edu Keywords: disk, salvage, shareware X-Review-Number: Volume 1996 Number 20 Originator: barrett@knots.cs.umass.edu PRODUCT NAME RDB-Salv Version 1.1 BRIEF DESCRIPTION RDB-Salv is able to recover your Rigid Disk Block after a crash. It also can backup the active RDB onto floppy disk in order to prevent disasters. RDB-Salv Version 1.1 is the first official release. All other previous versions are obsolete and should be replaced for security reasons. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Angela Schmidt Address: Finkenweg 26 89233 Neu-Ulm GERMANY E-mail: Angela.Schmidt@stud.uni-karlsruhe.de World Wide Web: http://home.pages.de/~Angela/ LIST PRICE DM 30.- for the registered version, and DM 10.- for a printed manual plus conventional shipping costs. Registration fees and commands are requested to send to the address given in the manual - not to the above address! DEMO VERSION All versions are demonstration version unless you register them using the registration form upon start. If you don't register, the Tool is only partially usable. Please read more about the restrictions in the paragraph "COPY PROTECTION". DISTRIBUTION RDB-Salv is freely distributed over the Internet. It cannot be found on the "AmiNet". The following addresses allow you to get ahold of the tool: http://home.pages.de/~zza/RDB-Salv/ - Go here if you are inside german internet called WIN, or have fast access to it. http://www.teuto.de/~markus/RDB-Salv/ - Go here if you are in rest of the world: i.e., USA, Scandinavia. RDB-Salv will also be found on future CD-ROMs such as "Meeting Pearls IV" and "Gateway! Vol. 3" and on the next issue of the "Amiga Magazin" (german Amiga Magazin) CD-ROM by 3Q96. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS The tools requires a working Amiga environment. Even if you completely crashed your Amiga hard drive system, you are still in need of at least one bootable floppy and a floppy which contains the tool to resurrect the RDB in order to make your hard drive system usable again. HARDWARE As this tool is for salvaging lost RDB, and as those are in most cases only found on a hard drive system, you would be in need of such a system. The tool requires at least 512KB of free RAM. It worked fine on Amiga equipped with 68000, 68030 and 68040. SOFTWARE The tool worked fine with AmigaDOS 2.04 (from V37 on) and 3.1. It works best with AmigaDOS 3.1. COPY PROTECTION You need a key string to register the program. The program itself is altered then and will from then on be usable as registered version. It will also store where it had been installed the time it was registered. After copying to a different partition or device, you need to re-register. The program installs easily on a hard drive or floppy. The copy protection is acceptable, the key string consist of 30 chars and digits. The restrictions of the demo version - which are completely understandable - are, that the functions "Backup" (with Reminder-to register-Requester) and "Restore" work. The function "Read" will as well, but "Salvage" will work but only display any found partitions but no values. Also you will not be able to write newly calculated and created RDB to the drive in the non-registered version. "RDB-Salv shall not be altered (patched). Those who do this anyway, should not be surprised by extremely uncomfortable side-effects. You are explicitly warned against removal of the registration number requester" - this is a cite from the manual and must agree that this is a very reasonable object. If you believe that pirating and cracking is gentleman delict, then please do take the time and read "http://www.bsa.org/". MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 3000/25, 20 MB Fast RAM, 2 MB Chip RAM. A3640 CPU board A2065 Ethernet board AmigaDOS 3.1 and NetBSD-Amiga 1.1 The following SCSI devices have been used throughout the test: Conner CFS1060S (1GB) Quantum FireBall 1280S (1GB) Quantum Atlas XP32150 (2GB) Quantum Atlas XP32400 (4GB) Quantum Trailblazer TB850S (850MB) IBM DPES 1080S (1GB) HP C3653A (9.1GB) Fujitsu M2623F-512 (500MB) Fujitsu Allegro M2949 (9.1GB) HP 35470A DAT-Streamer Plextor 4.1 x Speed CD-ROM INSTALLATION The supplied Installer script installs the Tool into an own directory on any place you want it to. It will copy the catalog files for the localization and the documentation supplied as AmigaGuide and DVI. Upon first start, RDB-Salv will ask you for the registration key. This key will register your copy and will also write your name into the binary itself. Once done, the tool is yours and is fully operational. REVIEW In the past 10 years one of the most painful thing which could happen to an Amiga user was losing the RDB on a hard drive. This RDB, also known as Rigid Disk Block or RDSK, is a small fraction found on every hard drive connected and made be usable with the Amiga. It contains the information about where to find the partitions on the hard drive, how to access the hard drive at all, how to mount it, and it even contains additional file systems. This makes the RDB useful and yet it makes it even the most important fraction at all on any hard drive system of the Amiga. Uncounted Amiga users have been struck by RDB loss in the past. Most of them tried some tools like "DiskSalv", "ABtools" or some such. Some of which quickly gave up, because most of those tools didn't recover all the information - if any - on your hard drive and the mentioned tools require enough space on another hard drive. If you had a backup (ha, who told you to backup right this morning!) you probably re-partitioned your hard drive and restored your backup from a tape. If you are unlucky but desperate enough, you could also try to start HdToolBox and try out numbers of combinations of Cyl/Track and mount experimental partitions using a Mountlist. If you were more lucky you had a copy of a Mountlist for all your partitions using a RDB-Tool, but you probably had no copy of a required file system to access this or the other partition. All of these are painful, time consuming, and only few of the attempts were successful at all. Most of the users simply gave up, re-formatted the hard drive and started to install their tools and applications from scratch. A disaster if you are a programmer and just lost half a year of work. Losing the RDB does not necessarily mean that all information on the hard drive is lost. It only means that you lost the information about how to access those data. Once you recalculated these numbers, you can get ahold of the rest as well. Angela Schmidt, a powerful Amiga user and developer since 1987, was ever since able to salvage her RDB by hand using her program "DisKey", a block oriented floppy and hard drive manipulation tool. Her knowledge about RDB, hard drive, device drivers and file systems make her an outstanding professional in terms of repairing hard drives struck by disaster of most kind including RDB lossage. RDB-Salv is assembled knowledge and contains various ideas, algorithms and implementations for salvaging your hard drive from her. It may be of use only very rarely - once every 2 years for example, or every week if your Amiga is a wreck rather than reliable - but it can save your live every now and then. The two goals of this tool are easy: Backup and restore existing RDB to floppy is for the prevention part. Salvaging RDB whilst scanning the entire hard drive for partitions upon lost of it is the other goal. The first is rather simple. You could do that yourself with other tools like "DCP", "streamstodev" or "dd". But RDB-Salv makes it more simple for you and does also offer more adequate ways to do so. Once the RDB crashed, you simply copy the backup to the hard drive, reboot and there you go sane and safe again. As for the second goal we arrive to the core of RDB-Salv. This is the part which is new to the Amiga. You need to distinguish between two states of RDB loss. One is that your Amiga is still more or less usable and the partitions are still mounted, but the RDB somehow went numb. For this state RDB-Salv offers the "Read" option. It will read the data for the partitions from RAM and existing data from the scrambled RDB and/or partition info from hard drive and create a new RDB which then can be edited and written to the hard drive. The other state - more often seen and more likely - is that the machine crashed entirely and the RDB is scrambled up. For this state, RDB-Salv offers the option "Salvage". This option will scan the entire disk for partition information. All information is assembled, can be edited and then be written as newly created RDB onto the hard drive. This option is the most important option of RDB-Salv. It goes through all possible combinations of Cyl/Track and block sizes, tries to find existing - regardless if valid or not, this cannot be found out - partition boundaries and calculates a new RDB out of this data. You can edit this RDB in the manner that found partitions can be deleted. Unfortunately this option is unable to find the former partition names (i.e. "DH0:") for these were previously stored in the now destroyed RDB! It will find volume names though (i.e. "Workbench 2.0"). You can write the RDB and then should start your hard drive installation tool, usually HdToolBox to adjust still missing minor informations. The manual covers this section in detail and explains what you need to do. My understanding is, that RDB-Salv could set most of these options itself, asking the user for his opinion for specific values. This might be incorporated in a new version. As for my tests, I created 256 partitions on each of the several hard drives I had access to. (Can you imagine 1024 icons on your Workbench?) I then wrote specific data to all partitions, so that I would recognize each partition after a probably resurrection. I used RDB-Salv to backup my RDB onto a floppy. Now I intentionally destroyed my RDB (ha - FUN! :-) - no, I won't tell you how, this task is left as homework to the reader of this review - and rebooted the machine. Rebooting the machine made it impossible for RDB-Salv to simply read the partition informations from RAM. Restoring the backup from floppy was an easy task and I immediately had success - all partitions alive again. Way too easy! Way too helpful! :-) The second test started with emulated disaster as well - intentionally destroying my RDB. I started RDB-Salv, chose "Salvage" and went away drinking a large cup of coffee as suggested in the manual. After about half an hour - depending on how large and fast the drive was - RDB-Salv showed a list of all my partitions and offered me to mount them immediately, create a new RDB and write it to the hard drive again. RDB-Salv only was - as described above - unable to find my former partition names. It cannot help it. Editing the list was not needed in my case. I wrote the new RDB and again all my partitions were alive and usable again. To complete the list of capabilities, I should mention that RDB-Salv is of course able to to find lost partitions using DOS0 (OFS), DOS1 up to DOS5 (Int-FS) AmigaDOS filesystem, as well as it is capable calculating partitions with Blocksizes of any size starting with 512Bytes up to 8K and more (2^16Bytes max). This way RDB-Salv doesn't settle you using slow blocksizes or outdated filesystems. It is albeit not yet capable finding NetBSD, MAC or AFS partitions - which may come later, I was told. DOCUMENTATION The documentation is one of the best I've ever read for a shareware tool. It comes with 40 pages of detailed description of every Tool Type of the program, as well as a description for every menu item, gadget and list view. It also covers an explanation of the how-to, what to do after salvaging, and how to protect yourself against future disasters. Supplied are three different types of manuals: AmigaGuide format, DVI (TeX) and normal ASCII. A printed version is available for a small extra fee from the author. The documentation is available in (at the time writing) 6 languages: german, english, french, norwegian, swedish and netherlands. The manuals I was able to read (original german, english and french) were excellent. The translations are perfectly understandable and it shows that some professionals did them! Catalogs files for localisation of the program are available for the above mentioned languages and additionally for (at the time writing) finnish and italian localized systems. I have yet to find a shareware product which has this amount of availability of foreign language manuals and catalog files. LIKES Finally a tool which prevents me from getting a heart attack the next time my RDB vanishes in a cloud if dust *Puff*. I like the easy-to-use GUI, all the possible options and opportunities to backup, recover, resurrect your RDB. I truly like the manual. The glossary and the index alone are worth reading! DISLIKES AND SUGGESTIONS I only have suggestions for a future release of this tool, because I was unable to find dislikes worth to be mentioned. Remove the scroller. OK, this is not a must. But my mouse doesn't like it. It seems the machine is very busy scrolling the bitmap, and most probably my Picasso graphic board software is one cause of this hassle (original Picasso drivers on my system). Try to include more HdToolBox features into RDB-Salv. This would make RDB-Salv more powerful, because it would prevent faults and wrong usage of HdToolBox. It also would make live more easy, because there still is quite a lot of work to do once you salvaged the RDB - most of which could be done automatically. (After cross-checking with the author, I was told that the above is on the "To Do" list. This will only be incorporated, alas, if the amount of registrations will support the ongoing efforts. Pirating and cracking a shareware product like RDB-Salv sure will not!) RDB-Salv can only find AmigaDOS Partitions using the Salvage (and only there!) Mode. It cannot yet find NetBSD, MAC, AFS or other partitions. This may change if the demand is high enough and the amount of registrations will make it possible to continue the work on this splendid tool. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS There is no tool which compares with RDB-Salv other than hand-crafted and mind-boggling HdToolBox sessions. Other tools are yet unable to assemble data from the hard drive and create a new RDB. BUGS I found no bugs in the release version. The tool is reliable. VENDOR SUPPORT The author promptly replies to questions about RDB-Salv. Alas the author will of course not help you setting up your hard drive (unless you pay her :-) if you are not able to handle RDB-Salv or read the manual and of course you need to be familiar with your hard drive system. WARRANTY The author cannot and does not provide any warranty. CONCLUSIONS For this tool is an outstanding and most-useful product, I give it 4 out of 5 stars. The last half star can be achieved if more functionality for the "after-salvage" is provided, and another can be gained if support for more file systems such as MAC-OS and NetBSD is integrated. COPYRIGHT NOTICE Copyright 1996, Markus Illenseer This review represents my honest opinion; your mileage may vary, so tell me about it! If you use this review in any way - republishing for example, the author requests at least a copy of the used media. Commercial reuse is prohibited unless written permission is given. You can contact the author at: Markus Illenseer Rathenaustr. 75 33102 Paderborn GERMANY markus@tiger.teuto.de http://www.teuto.de/~markus/ --- Accepted and posted by Daniel Barrett, comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews Web site: ftp://math.uh.edu/pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews/index.html