Hi all,

just hooked up an old clunker
(a caviar 280 with 80.1MB formatted space. )

at first glance, the old DOS6.22 mirror tool won't work on any sort of hard drive in 98 environment.
the reason, Long file name protection.

the different modes have differing error message.
when run in real mode, one must reboot
message said something about LOCK.....

when run in dosbox, windows itself comes up with a message about an old dos tool, and says something about long file name protection...
it allows you Y/N in the message, and mirroring is not succesful.

still works on floppy in both modes, tho.
Go figure

however, it said something about LOCK
what I did next was simple
LOCK D:
mirror D:
and presto, mirror worked
and the rest works too.
mirror and unformat won't work without direct access (iow, lock)

conclusions;
  • DOS6.22 unformat works on a floppy when mirror was run on it
  • unformat still recovers data when win98SE's format was used to format A:
  • unformat cannot recover data when format A: /U was ran
  • mirror and unformat cannot be used on hard drive without first locking it.
  • mirror and unformat are no longer intended to be used as they apparently have an issue with long file names. Even in win98, REAL MODE DOS still uses the 8.3 convention.
  • don't rely on LFNBK.EXE util (on win98 CDROM) to get you out of a mess. It ain't intuitive...
  • Microsoft killed their best tools


Thank god for third party utilities

final final conclusion.
/U ain't so academic yet?

btw, after tests like this, one must not forget to UNLOCK D:

Jaak


[This message has been edited by jtdoom (edited 05-16-2001).]