[Coco] Need a dir -e but extended.

[gene heskett]

On Friday, December 24, 2010 10:46:44 pm Richard E. Crislip did opine:
[...]
 
> > > > > > A decade or more back, we had a disk or file utility that
> > > > > > worked something like a dir -e does now, but where a dir -e
> > > > > > only gets the location of that filenames fd sector and
> > > > > > reports that as the files address, it read and decoded the
> > > > > > rest of that sector to show where each piece of the file was
> > > > > > located on the disk, and also the size of the file from that
> > > > > > FD, this utility returned a complete list of all the
> > > > > > allocated sectors and the size of each allocation.  So it
> > > > > > showed the offset and size of every segment of a files fd
> > > > > > sector.  But I don't recall the name of the thing and nothing
> > > > > > I see on that Seagate's various cmds dirs (there are several)
> > > > > > rings even a teeny little bell.
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > Can someone refresh my memory?  Please?

FWIW, that was a util that S. B. Goldberg wrote, called 'filext'.  I found 
a copy and put it to use, cleaned up the drive with ded and dcheck, then 
had dsave re-write everything from the old Maxtor to a directory on the 
Seagate, which took a re-write of makdir and about 20 hours to complete, so 
my coco is back among the living but powered down for the first time in a 
couple of weeks.  The re-write of makdir gets rid of the error 218 if the 
directory already exists, it is truly a harmless error.  That should have 
been done that way from the gitgo in '84, but it was easier than going 
through a megabyte of dsave output to remove all but 4 of them.

I'll see if I can get this new makdir into the nitros9 cvs repo eventually.

> > > > > 
> > > > > Hi Gene,
> > > > > 
> > > > > The last time I did anything like that was with a RSDOS program
> > > > > called CoCoZap. It displayed a graphical picture of what it
> > > > > found on the disk and, after studying the patterns one could
> > > > > discern the bad areas and make changes that would allow the
> > > > > dist to at least be read. I do remember trying iton an OS-9
> > > > > disk, and for sure I did not try it on an Nitros-9 disk 8-).
> > > > > 
> > > > > Richard
> > > > 
> > > > This is os9/nitros9, and there is no resemblance between the file
> > > > structures on the disk.
> > > 
> > > You're probably correct, but I remember it as being a raw data
> > > reader, didn't care about filesystems.
> > > 
> > > Richard
> > 
> > It may not Richard, but I have almost zero knowledge of the rsdos file
> > system while I am long term conversant with os9 and its filesystem. 
> > So ded is my tool of choice.
> > 
> > BTW, Merry Christmas to you and yours.
> 
> Merry Christmas to you and your wife too.

Thank you.
 
> BTW, the ole Amy2500 is still occupying a place on my table.

It probably needs dusted by now. :)

> Wish I had
> more time to play with it... but that would probaly mean that I am
> jobless, so I'll take it back 8-).

Good heavens no, can't have that.  Somebody here has to do the work!

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
If *I* had a hammer, there'd be no more folk singers.