59 lines
2.5 KiB
Plaintext
59 lines
2.5 KiB
Plaintext
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(C) Yan Seiner 1988
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May not be used in any commercial product without express written permission of
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the author. May be copied, and distributed freely with this doc file.
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bse drive_letter
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is a simple boot sector editor. It is designed to complement Norton's Advanced
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Utilites, which for some unfathomable reason, does not provide one.
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WARNING!!!!!
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bse can trash your disks with ease. DOS takes the boot sector very seriously.
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Changing things randomly can lose you all your data, as well as damage your
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hardware. MAKE BACKUPS before using it on your hard disks. Learn how to use it
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on floppies. Get a good book on DOS (Ray Duncan's Advanced DOS comes to mind.)
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IN NO CASE WILL I BE RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU USE BSE!!!! MAKE
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BACKUPS!!! KNOW WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN WHEN YOU CHANGE THE BOOT SECTOR BEFORE
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YOU MAKE ANY CHANGES!!!!
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Changing cluster size
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Why should I do that? Because DOS is very stupid. It formats small hard disks
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with large clusters. What this means is that EVERY file on a 10 Meg HD takes at
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least 4K. Many of my files are small (under 1K) and changing cluster size to 1K
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increased my useful storage by over 30%.
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What is a cluster?
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A cluster is a group of sectors. A sector is 512 bytes long. DOS stores files
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in clusters. Thus, a HD with 8 sector clusters will require 4K per file, no
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matter how small. Fortunately, a cluster can consist of almost any number of
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sectors. It is best for a cluster to consist of powers of two multiples of
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sectors. A 10 Meg HD is formatted with 8 sector clusters by default. You can
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change this to 4, 2, or even 1. There are drawbacks to using a small cluster,
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but if you have a lot of RAM and not enough disk space, you can gain a lot.
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Using small clusters tends to leave less room for programs in RAM. This should
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not be a concern unless you have only 256K RAM.
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How to change cluster size
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1. Cold boot DOS.
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2. MAKE BACKUPS. One as a minmum, two preferrably.
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3. Make a bootable floppy, with bse and format on it.
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4. Run bse, specifying drive letter.
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4a. Change sectors per cluster
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4b. Hit F9 to calculate FAT size (should be around 40 sectors)
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4c. Hit F10 to exit, writing changes to sector.
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5. Cold boot DOS to read new boot sector (it is read once, at boot time.)
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Disk is now unreadable.
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6. Format disk.
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7. Restore from backups.
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Good Luck!
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Yan Seiner 1988
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223-C King St.
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Princeton, NJ 08540
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