The Nova Utilities README. Release S-1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is the first shareware release of the Nova Utilities. Prior to this release the Nova Utilities was a commercial program. We have changed our distribution to shareware; the story behind the change is told in the NOVA.DOC file in this archive. This file contains corrections and additions to your User's Guide, plus other information we thought you should know. You can print this file from the VIEW program by entering F2 or from DOS by entering TYPE A:README >PRN 1. CORRECTIONS/ADDITIONS TO THE USER'S GUIDE SET50 o This is a new program which sets a VGA card into 50-line mode. You must have a BIOS-compatible VGA card for this program to work. It has no options or arguments; just type set50 at the DOS prompt, or put it in your startup batch file. SHERLOCK o Installing SHERLOCK : SHERLOCK Help data has been moved to a separate file. When SHERLOCK is first run, it will look for the Help file (SHERLOCK.HLP) in the root directory of the current disk. If it isn't there, SHERLOCK will warn you. You can still run SHERLOCK normally, but the Help selections in each menu won't do anything. To install SHERLOCK, then, copy the program file (SHERLOCK.COM) to a directory accessible via your PATH environment variable. Next copy the help file (SHERLOCK.HLP) to the root directory of the same disk. o A new function in the Sector menu is WRITE. Choosing Write from the Sector menu lets you store the cluster you're viewing to a file. If the file you specify already exists, SHERLOCK will ask if you want to add the cluster to the existing file. If you do, it's appended to the end of the file. This feature lets you accumulate data from different places on a disk. It's useful for recovering partial files when the beginning of the file chain is lost. IMPORTANT!! You should ALWAYS write sectors of a file you're trying to recover to a DIFFERENT DISK! When DOS creates a new file it first tries to reuse directory entries and clusters of previously deleted files. You may inadvertantly overwrite part of the file you're trying to recover. In fact, you might overwrite the cluster you're looking at! Note that the WRITE function *duplicates* the data in the cluster you're viewing. You won't create cross-links or orphaned clusters from using WRITE. o In the Sector display area, pressing loads the next cluster in the chain the current sector belongs to, if any. The first sector in that cluster is displayed. Use this feature to trace partial files, but take note: the next chained cluster does not automatically belong to the same file as the sector you are viewing, since DOS doesn't "clean up" after erased files. Also, sectors before the first data sector on a disk do not have cluster numbers. Use Info from the Main Menu to find the first data sector. o To recover a file in a subdirectory after the subdirectory has been removed, first recover the subdirectory, then use OPTIONS to change the current path to the recovered subdirectory, then choose RECOVER again to select the file to recover. o SHERLOCK cannot read disk partitions greater than 32M. It will work with DOS 4.x on floppies and hard disk partitions less than 32M. MOVE o A new command qualifier is /LIST filename. This causes MOVE to write the name of each file transfered to the specified file. One use for this is to create diskette labels for the target diskette. o The /PACK option in MOVE can sometimes not fill a diskette 100%, even if there is a combination of files that would do so. This can happen when: 1) the file transfer is to a subdirectory, or 2) when the file transfer creates subdirectories, as with the /IMAGE and /GRAFT. The reason is that MOVE can't know for sure how much additional disk space will be needed by subdirectory entries until the files have already been transfered. To be safe, MOVE assumes that all remaining source files will have to be transfered to the target directory, and assumes that there is no wasted space in the subdirectory that DOS could reuse. If this seems confusing, believe me, it is. o The /FORMAT qualifier uses the following logic to find the proper program to format the destination disk: - If there is a FORMAT.EXE in the current directory, it's used; - Else if there's a FORMAT.BAT in the current directory, it's used; - Else MOVE searches the system path for the following files: FORMAT.COM FORMAT.EXE FORMAT.BAT in that order. The reason for this logic is to allow you to override the default FORMAT with a local batch file. This is useful if you want to format diskettes in something other than the default that FORMAT uses. In all cases, however, MOVE requires that there's a FORMAT program available on your system. PDIR o PDIR can also create directories, a feature that was omitted from the manual. To create a new directory, press F10 to open the Tagged Item Menu Window, then press F5 to Create a subdirectory. Enter the name for the directory following the prompt in the Command Window. o Only files of 64k or less can be viewed completely. For files larger than 64k, only the first 64k is loaded. o The System Statistics selection from the Tag File Services menu cannot handle disk partitions > 32M. Otherwise, PDIR works normally under DOS 4.x. QUALIFIER FORMATS o Due to a quirk in the way commands are parsed a qualifier which requires an argument cannot be the last item in a command. Make these qualifiers global by putting them first on the command line. Examples: C> mdel *.bak /before today .... WRONG! C> mdel /before today *.bak .... RIGHT! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ End of README.