SFSDoctor - The Disk Recovery and Repair Suite
***** Installation *****
Installation is really easy and simple. Just copy SFSDoctor tool somewhere to
your disk. The preferred place is SYS:Tools. SFSDoctor does not need any third
party MUI classes and system add-ons and works even if the system is started
from plain MorphOS 1.4.5 CD. Is is also advised to burn a rescue CD with this
tools to be able to fix disks and recover files after a complete system and disk
crash.
***** Disclaimer *****
Using repair module of this tool DOES MODIFY your disk. Make sure you have
backed up all your important data.
Remember that YOU USE THIS TOOL ON YOUR OWN RISK!
The author, developers, and all concerned cannot and will not take
responsibility for any damage done to your data or disks.
***** Common use cases *****
* Checking disk for errors:
Easiest case. Just select your partition and press 'Check disk' button.
* Repairing non-critical (i.e. checksum error in adminspace block) disk errors:
Select your partition and press 'Scan disk' button. Check if all your files are
listed. Also check if there are any errors reported in the log. Make sure that
all files you want to keep on the disk are 'marked'. Press 'Repair disk' button,
select file to save metadata backup and wait a minute.
WARNING - 'Repair disk' action DOES MODIFY your partition. Please read the
discaimer.
* Recovering files from damaged disk to another partition:
Select your partition and press 'Scan disk' button. If there were critical
errors in disk structure you may even get information, that no SFS filesystem
has been found on the disk. Just ignore this message. If you don't have much
time you may mark 'Quick scan' option. Disabling that option will result in
complete scan, which gives better results, but takes considerably more time.
Also mark the 'Allow location quessing' option. Press 'Find lost files' button
and wait until this operation finishes. After some time (depending on the size
of your partition) you will see the list of files and dirs that has been found
on disk. You may also get an information that some files are colliding with
other ones. Just ignore this.
Select all files you want to recover with 'Mark' option and then press 'Recover
files' button. Some recovered files may be a complete garbage. This usually
happens when you recover one of file that were on colliding file list.
* Repairing disk after serious damage (i.e. quick format, trashed root blocks):
Like in previous paragraph, first you need to use 'Scan disk' module, then 'Find
lost files' module. Selecting 'Allow location guessing' usually is a bad idea,
because it will create a lot of dummy, colliding files. You would get a
directory tree of files found on disk. The log you may also get a list of
colliding files. If you got no collidion files after 'Find lost files' action
you are lucky :)
Colliding files are two (or more) files that occupies the same blocks on disk
(simmilar to 'crossed files' known from FAT checking tools). Such files cannont
normally exist on disk. They very often appears during 'Find lost files' action,
when SFSDoctor find an old file descriptor. That descriptor for some reasons has
not been cleared/reaused. It was describing a file that was deleted, overwritten
or moved to other place on disk. However such files cannot be distinguished from
normal files, that's way they appear in file list. Usually the pair of colliding
files consist of a real, 'normal' file and a 'dead' one.
If you want to repair filesystem structure, there can't be any colliding files
in directory tree. The best way to decide which file from colliding files pair
is real one is to recover both files to another disk with 'Recover files' module
and check the content of recovered files. With this method you should easily
find all 'dead' files in directory tree. This is a bit long and laborius
process, but this really can't be done in other way. Usually if you find one
'dead' file in a directory, then all files in such directory are 'dead'.
You may always check if all files that are 'marked' collides with themself by
pressing 'Check collisions' button. Make sure that all 'dead' files are not
marked. Select 'Repair disk' button. All files that are not marked will be
removed from directory tree, then whole directory tree will be recreated on
disk.
WARNING - 'Repair disk' action DOES MODIFY your partition. Please read the
discaimer.
* Continue interrupted (power failure, application crash) 'Repair disk' action:
During the disk repair action all information about files is being overwritten
on disk. That's why before this happen so called metadata backup is created.
Make sure that this file is stored on other, working partition (and don't use
Ram Disk for it!). If the repair operation is interrupted, reboot the system
then run SFSDoctor and use 'Load backup' module. Select 'Repair disk' button to
process the operation again.
* Changing the filesystem options (recycled dir presence or case sensitivness)
This operation doesn't really differ from repairing non-critical errors. Select
your partition and press 'Scan disk' button. Check if all your files are listed.
Also check if there are any errors reported in the log. Make sure that all files
you want to keep on the disk are 'marked'. Change filesystem options in 'Repair
disk options' group, then press 'Repair disk' button, select file to save
metadata backup and wait a minute.
WARNING - 'Repair disk' action DOES MODIFY your partition. Please read the
discaimer.
* Operating on badly damaged partition that causes system to crash
It may happen that your partition is damaged so badly that SFS filesystem driver
throws a lot of error requesters, decreases heavily system stability or even
crashes. In such case it is advised to run system from rescue or system CD, then
quickly run SCSIConfig tool and select damaged partition. Change filesystem type
for that partition to FFS. This will prevent SFS driver from loading and
crashing. Make sure that you do not change any other partition parameter. Save
changes and reboot. This operation does not modify or affect any data on the
partition.
Damaged partition is now not visible, but the system operates stable. Run
SFSDoctor and select 'Show all' option in device group. The damaged partition
should be now listed in device list and you can operate on it. When you finish
the repair run SCSIConfig and change filesystem type back to SFS. After reboot
the partition will be visible again.
ADVISE: Do not try to quick format such partition and then restore data from it.
Although it is possible, it will cause damage to the directory tree and some
files. The method with changing filesystem type usually allows to repeair the
disk completely without any loosing any file.
***** Configuration options *****
There are 2 tooltypes that changes the amount of memory used by SFSDoctor for
disk cache buffers:
* BUFFERSIZE - size of single buffer in bytes - this is the amount of data read
in single disk access; in most cases the default value is the right one
* NUMBUFFERS - total number of buffers - SFSDoctor will consume
(BUFFERSIZE * NUMBUFFERS) bytes of memory; higher number of buffers usually
speeds up scan and check operations
***** Known problems *****
* Window title bar gets corrupted when device list is ghosted - this is known
MUI 3.9 bug
* You may get an information that your partition is being used by other
applications even if you just started the system and there are no other
programs running - this is problably caused by an assign made during system
startup.
***** Thanks *****
The author would like to thank following people:
* John Hendrikx - for SmartFileSystem
* Marcin 'Morgoth' Kurek - for help in understanding SFS structures, source code
examples and libDeviceIO library
* Michal 'kiero' Wozniak - for patience, help in finding bugs, alpha and beta
testing
* Krzysztof 'Tarnak' Kretus and Michal 'Rzookol' Zukowski - for beeing so brave
to do alpha and beta testing
* Tomasz 'Kaczus' Kaczanowski - for suggestions, help in development and beta
testing
* Marian 'MaaG' Guc - for AutoDocReader and help in development
* whole #castor-cvs team - for motivation and help with MUI problems
* Tokai and JoBBo - for really nice icons
* Stefan Stuntz - for MUI
* Dietmar Eilert - for MorphED
* Targhan - for managing SFSDoctor bounty donations
* all who I forgot to list here
Special thanks to people who donated this project:
* amigaharry
* Weiseb
* Henes
* saragaglia
* GerdK
* roschmyr
* pegasosuser
* RMS
* DrB
***** Author, contact and copyright infos *****
SFSDoctor has been written by Marek 'March' Szyprowski.
Contact: <marek amiga.pl>
Copyright (C) 2005, 2006 Marek 'March' Szyprowski.
SFSDoctor is a free software.
New in 1.1 (01.05.2006)
- disk bitmap is now allocated before disk is scanned to solve lack of continous
memory problem
- added simplified and verbose file collision check modes
- some minor GUI changes (added appicon, added timestamps in log, fixed MUI
prefs window)
- fixed small memory leaks (thx to Morgoth!)
- fixed crashes on low memory conditions
- adapted to new, better build scripts (again, thx to Morgoth)
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