🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <5037@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> landay@cory.Berkeley.EDU (James A. Landay) writes:
>This evening I was trying to speed up my hard drive by unfragmenting it.
>I used Simon Poole's REGORG (v. .04)  First I did partition C.  No Problem
>(I had FOLDER999.PRG in case of 40 folder problems)  I then rebooted.
>Did partition D.  After 10 mins. or so, strange things started to happen.
>The amount done indicator reached the end of the space for it and kept
>going.  Went past the end of the dialog box.  Kept going.  To the edge of
>the screen.  CRASSSSSSSSSSSSH!!!!!!!!! BOMBSSSSSSSSS!!!
>
>Rebooted!  Partition D was fried!!!  Luckily I had backed up with Turtle
>the night before (great program George!)  I used the BMS utility to 
...... 
>Is there a new (safe) version of REORG?

First a comment on the specific problem:
(skip this part if you are not interested in this, more about the
status of DL II after it)
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Here's the relevant part from the (never finished) DL II Manual:

-              Appendix A: ReOrg, a disk reorganizer
-
-IMPORTANT: REORG IS NOT A STANDALONE PROGRAM! YOU NEED AT LEAST A 
-IMAGE  BACKUP PROGRAM AND A DISKCHECK PROGRAM BEFORE YOU CAN  USE 
-IT!
-
-IMPORTANT:  ALWAYS,  ALWAYS  MAKE  AN IMAGE BACKUP OF  YOUR  DISK 
-BEFORE RUNNING REORG ON IT!
-
-ReOrg  improves disk performance on harddisk and floppys  through 
-better placement of subdirectories and files on disk and  through 
-defragmentation  of  the files themselves,  it will  also  remove 
-deleted and zero length entries.
-
-As the actual reorganizing is NOT an incremental process,  during 
-the  time from the start of the reorganization to the end of  it, 
-your disk is in a unusable condition (at least from the viewpoint 
-of  the  operating system).  This means,  that a  power  failure, 
-computer  malfunction,  disk error or program failure during  the 
-reorganization will leave you with a corrupted disk!
-
-To run ReOrg: backup your disk,  run the diskcheck program on  it 
-(DL  II  will work ok) and ONLY run ReOrg after  all  crosslinked 
-and lost clusters have been disposed of!  ReOrg has NO protection 
-against  incorrect  disks and will probably run into  a  infinite 
-loop if you do not take these precautions!
-
-After you have run ReOrg and reorganized your disk,  the computer 
-will   reboot,   this  is  normal  and  serves  the  purpose   of 
-reinitializing the TOS internal directory tree.    

[A file by file backup will do, it's just not as quick]

There is per definition no 'safe' version of this kind of program.
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Second Part:

Now and then people ask me about updates to two programs (DLII and
ReOrg) I wrote in 86/87 and had in Beta test for a few months. The
versions were never released officialy in any way to the public (I
did  allow a bit wider  distribution in one case),  and if  people 
would  actually read  copyright notices, it probably wouldn't have
gone unnoticed that there is no mention of  free copying etc......

I more or less decided a few months ago  never to distribute these
programs in an enhanced and bug-fixed form  (something my personal
versions are). At the time I had two options:

     - produce a very much enhanced version as a commercial
       product: I decided not to do this, as it would have
       ment another 6 Months or so of extra developement and
       programming (6 months being optimistic), with rather
       unsure financial rewards (not to mention that working
       on a project also means an initial investment (you still
       have to live on something) of $$$$$$ which I don't have).

     - distribute it under the same terms as UniTerm: which would
       have ment:
            - finishing the manual (~1 months work)
              (this naturally also translates into $$$$$) 
            - support ~1h/day for the next two years
              (extrapolation from time I spend on UniTerm
               plus questions about the beta test version
               of DL II (you would all be suprised how many
               buggy ramdisks are out there.....))
            - near zero income

As neither of there possibilities are really viable, I just decided
to to NOTHING. 
     
-- 
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