Subject: REVIEW: RDB-Salv Version 1.1
From: [email-masked] (Markus Illenseer)
Date: 8 Jul 1996 14:54:47 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews

PRODUCT NAME

	RDB-Salv Version 1.1

BRIEF DESCRIPTION

	RDB-Salv is able to recover your Rigid Disk Block after a
crash. It also can backup the active RDB onto floppy disk in order to
prevent disasters.

	RDB-Salv Version 1.1 is the first official release.  All other
previous versions are obsolete and should be replaced for security
reasons.

AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION

	Name:		Angela Schmidt
	Address:	Finkenweg 26
			89233 Neu-Ulm
			GERMANY

	E-mail:		[email-masked]
	World Wide Web:	http://home.pages.de/~Angela/

LIST PRICE
	
	DM 30.- for the registered version, and DM 10.- for a printed
manual plus conventional shipping costs.

	Registration fees and commands are requested to send to the
address given in the manual - not to the above address!

DEMO VERSION

	All versions are demonstration version unless you register
them using the registration form upon start.  If you don't register,
the Tool is only partially usable. 

	Please read more about the restrictions in the paragraph "COPY
PROTECTION".

DISTRIBUTION

	RDB-Salv is freely distributed over the Internet.  It cannot
be found on the "AmiNet".  The following addresses allow you to get
ahold of the tool:

	http://home.pages.de/~zza/RDB-Salv/ - Go here if you are inside
german internet called WIN, or have fast access to it.
	http://www.teuto.de/~markus/RDB-Salv/ - Go here if you are in
rest of the world: i.e., USA, Scandinavia.

	RDB-Salv will also be found on future CD-ROMs such as "Meeting
Pearls IV" and "Gateway! Vol. 3" and on the next issue of the "Amiga
Magazin" (german Amiga Magazin) CD-ROM by 3Q96.

SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

	The tools requires a working Amiga environment. Even if you
completely crashed your Amiga hard drive system, you are still in need
of at least one bootable floppy and a floppy which contains the tool
to resurrect the RDB in order to make your hard drive system usable
again.

	HARDWARE

		As this tool is for salvaging lost RDB, and as those
		are in most cases only found on a hard drive system,
		you would be in need of such a system.

		The tool requires at least 512KB of free RAM.
	
		It worked fine on Amiga equipped with 68000, 68030 and
		68040.

	SOFTWARE
	
		The tool worked fine with AmigaDOS 2.04 (from V37 on)
		and 3.1.  It works best with AmigaDOS 3.1.

COPY PROTECTION

	You need a key string to register the program.  The program
itself is altered then and will from then on be usable as registered
version.  It will also store where it had been installed the time it
was registered.  After copying to a different partition or device, you
need to re-register.

	The program installs easily on a hard drive or floppy.

	The copy protection is acceptable, the key string consist of
30 chars and digits.

	 The restrictions of the demo version - which are completely
understandable - are, that the functions "Backup" (with Reminder-to
register-Requester) and "Restore" work.  The function "Read" will as
well, but "Salvage" will work but only display any found partitions
but no values.  Also you will not be able to write newly calculated and
created RDB to the drive in the non-registered version.

	"RDB-Salv shall not be altered (patched).  Those who do this
anyway, should not be surprised by extremely uncomfortable
side-effects.  You are explicitly warned against removal of the
registration number requester" - this is a cite from the manual and
must agree that this is a very reasonable object.  

	If you believe that pirating and cracking is gentleman delict,
then please do take the time and read "http://www.bsa.org/".

MACHINE USED FOR TESTING

	Amiga 3000/25, 20 MB Fast RAM, 2 MB Chip RAM.
	A3640 CPU board
        A2065 Ethernet board
	AmigaDOS 3.1 and NetBSD-Amiga 1.1

	The following SCSI devices have been used throughout the test:

        Conner CFS1060S (1GB)
	Quantum FireBall 1280S (1GB)
	Quantum Atlas XP32150 (2GB)
	Quantum Atlas XP32400 (4GB)
	Quantum Trailblazer TB850S (850MB)
	IBM DPES 1080S (1GB)
	HP C3653A (9.1GB)
	Fujitsu M2623F-512 (500MB)
	Fujitsu Allegro M2949 (9.1GB)
	HP 35470A DAT-Streamer
	Plextor 4.1 x Speed CD-ROM

INSTALLATION

	The supplied Installer script installs the Tool into an own
directory on any place you want it to.  It will copy the catalog files
for the localization and the documentation supplied as AmigaGuide and
DVI.

	Upon first start, RDB-Salv will ask you for the registration
key.  This key will register your copy and will also write your name
into the binary itself.  Once done, the tool is yours and is fully
operational.

REVIEW

	In the past 10 years one of the most painful thing which could
happen to an Amiga user was losing the RDB on a hard drive.

	This RDB, also known as Rigid Disk Block or RDSK, is a small
fraction found on every hard drive connected and made be usable with
the Amiga.  It contains the information about where to find the
partitions on the hard drive, how to access the hard drive at all, how
to mount it, and it even contains additional file systems.

	This makes the RDB useful and yet it makes it even the most
important fraction at all on any hard drive system of the Amiga.

	Uncounted Amiga users have been struck by RDB loss in the
past.  Most of them tried some tools like "DiskSalv", "ABtools" or
some such.  Some of which quickly gave up, because most of those tools
didn't recover all the information - if any - on your hard drive and
the mentioned tools require enough space on another hard drive.  If
you had a backup (ha, who told you to backup right this morning!) you
probably re-partitioned your hard drive and restored your backup from
a tape.  If you are unlucky but desperate enough, you could also try
to start HdToolBox and try out numbers of combinations of Cyl/Track
and mount experimental partitions using a Mountlist.  If you were more
lucky you had a copy of a Mountlist for all your partitions using a
RDB-Tool, but you probably had no copy of a required file system to
access this or the other partition.

	 All of these are painful, time consuming, and only few of the
attempts were successful at all.  Most of the users simply gave up,
re-formatted the hard drive and started to install their tools and
applications from scratch.  A disaster if you are a programmer and
just lost half a year of work.

	Losing the RDB does not necessarily mean that all information
on the hard drive is lost.  It only means that you lost the
information about how to access those data.  Once you recalculated
these numbers, you can get ahold of the rest as well.

	Angela Schmidt, a powerful Amiga user and developer since
1987, was ever since able to salvage her RDB by hand using her program
"DisKey", a block oriented floppy and hard drive manipulation tool.
Her knowledge about RDB, hard drive, device drivers and file systems
make her an outstanding professional in terms of repairing hard drives
struck by disaster of most kind including RDB lossage.

	RDB-Salv is assembled knowledge and contains various ideas,
algorithms and implementations for salvaging your hard drive from her.
It may be of use only very rarely - once every 2 years for example, or
every week if your Amiga is a wreck rather than reliable - but it can
save your live every now and then.

	The two goals of this tool are easy:  Backup and restore
existing RDB to floppy is for the prevention part.  Salvaging RDB
whilst scanning the entire hard drive for partitions upon lost of it
is the other goal.  The first is rather simple.  You could do that
yourself with other tools like "DCP", "streamstodev" or "dd".  But
RDB-Salv makes it more simple for you and does also offer more
adequate ways to do so.  Once the RDB crashed, you simply copy the
backup to the hard drive, reboot and there you go sane and safe again.

	As for the second goal we arrive to the core of RDB-Salv.
This is the part which is new to the Amiga.  You need to distinguish
between two states of RDB loss.  One is that your Amiga is still more
or less usable and the partitions are still mounted, but the RDB
somehow went numb.  For this state RDB-Salv offers the "Read" option.
It will read the data for the partitions from RAM and existing data
from the scrambled RDB and/or partition info from hard drive and
create a new RDB which then can be edited and written to the hard
drive. 

	The other state - more often seen and more likely - is that
the machine crashed entirely and the RDB is scrambled up.  For this
state, RDB-Salv offers the option "Salvage".  This option will scan
the entire disk for partition information.  All information is
assembled, can be edited and then be written as newly created RDB onto
the hard drive.  This option is the most important option of RDB-Salv.
It goes through all possible combinations of Cyl/Track and block sizes,
tries to find existing - regardless if valid or not, this cannot be
found out - partition boundaries and calculates a new RDB out of this
data.  You can edit this RDB in the manner that found partitions can
be deleted.  Unfortunately this option is unable to find the former
partition names (i.e.  "DH0:") for these were previously stored in the
now destroyed RDB!  It will find volume names though (i.e.  "Workbench
2.0").  You can write the RDB and then should start your hard drive
installation tool, usually HdToolBox to adjust still missing minor
informations.  The manual covers this section in detail and explains
what you need to do.  My understanding is, that RDB-Salv could set
most of these options itself, asking the user for his opinion for
specific values.  This might be incorporated in a new version.

	As for my tests, I created 256 partitions on each of the
several hard drives I had access to.  (Can you imagine 1024 icons on
your Workbench?) I then wrote specific data to all partitions, so that
I would recognize each partition after a probably resurrection.  I
used RDB-Salv to backup my RDB onto a floppy.  Now I intentionally
destroyed my RDB (ha - FUN!  :-) - no, I won't tell you how, this task
is left as homework to the reader of this review - and rebooted the
machine.  Rebooting the machine made it impossible for RDB-Salv to
simply read the partition informations from RAM.

	Restoring the backup from floppy was an easy task and I
immediately had success - all partitions alive again.  Way too easy!  Way
too helpful!  :-)

	The second test started with emulated disaster as well -
intentionally destroying my RDB.

	I started RDB-Salv, chose "Salvage" and went away drinking a
large cup of coffee as suggested in the manual.  After about half an
hour - depending on how large and fast the drive was - RDB-Salv showed
a list of all my partitions and offered me to mount them immediately,
create a new RDB and write it to the hard drive again.  RDB-Salv only
was - as described above - unable to find my former partition names.
It cannot help it.  Editing the list was not needed in my case.  I
wrote the new RDB and again all my partitions were alive and usable
again.

	To complete the list of capabilities, I should mention that
RDB-Salv is of course able to to find lost partitions using DOS0
(OFS), DOS1 up to DOS5 (Int-FS) AmigaDOS filesystem, as well as it is
capable calculating partitions with Blocksizes of any size starting
with 512Bytes up to 8K and more (2^16Bytes max).  This way RDB-Salv
doesn't settle you using slow blocksizes or outdated filesystems.  It
is albeit not yet capable finding NetBSD, MAC or AFS partitions - which
may come later, I was told.

DOCUMENTATION

	The documentation is one of the best I've ever read for a
shareware tool.  It comes with 40 pages of detailed description of
every Tool Type of the program, as well as a description for every
menu item, gadget and list view.  It also covers an explanation of
the how-to, what to do after salvaging, and how to protect yourself
against future disasters.

	Supplied are three different types of manuals:  AmigaGuide
format, DVI (TeX) and normal ASCII.  A printed version is available
for a small extra fee from the author. 

	The documentation is available in (at the time writing) 6
languages:  german, english, french, norwegian, swedish and
netherlands.  The manuals I was able to read (original german, english
and french) were excellent.  The translations are perfectly
understandable and it shows that some professionals did them!

	Catalogs files for localisation of the program are available
for the above mentioned languages and additionally for (at the time
writing) finnish and italian localized systems.

	I have yet to find a shareware product which has this amount
of availability of foreign language manuals and catalog files.

LIKES

	Finally a tool which prevents me from getting a heart attack
the next time my RDB vanishes in a cloud if dust *Puff*.  I like the
easy-to-use GUI, all the possible options and opportunities to backup,
recover, resurrect your RDB.

	I truly like the manual.  The glossary and the index alone are
worth reading!

DISLIKES AND SUGGESTIONS

	I only have suggestions for a future release of this tool,
because I was unable to find dislikes worth to be mentioned.

	Remove the scroller.  OK, this is not a must.  But my mouse
doesn't like it.  It seems the machine is very busy scrolling the
bitmap, and most probably my Picasso graphic board software is one
cause of this hassle (original Picasso drivers on my system).

	Try to include more HdToolBox features into RDB-Salv.  This
would make RDB-Salv more powerful, because it would prevent faults
and wrong usage of HdToolBox.  It also would make live more easy,
because there still is quite a lot of work to do once you salvaged the
RDB - most of which could be done automatically. 

	(After cross-checking with the author, I was told that the
above is on the "To Do" list.  This will only be incorporated, alas, if
the amount of registrations will support the ongoing efforts.
Pirating and cracking a shareware product like RDB-Salv sure will
not!)

	RDB-Salv can only find AmigaDOS Partitions using the Salvage
(and only there!) Mode.  It cannot yet find NetBSD, MAC, AFS or other
partitions.  This may change if the demand is high enough and the
amount of registrations will make it possible to continue the work on
this splendid tool. 

COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS

	There is no tool which compares with RDB-Salv other than
hand-crafted and mind-boggling HdToolBox sessions.  Other tools are yet
unable to assemble data from the hard drive and create a new RDB.

BUGS

	I found no bugs in the release version. The tool is reliable.

VENDOR SUPPORT

	The author promptly replies to questions about RDB-Salv.  Alas
the author will of course not help you setting up your hard drive
(unless you pay her :-) if you are not able to handle RDB-Salv or read
the manual and of course you need to be familiar with your hard drive
system.

WARRANTY

	The author cannot and does not provide any warranty.

CONCLUSIONS

	For this tool is an outstanding and most-useful product, I
give it 4 out of 5 stars.  The last half star can be achieved if more
functionality for the "after-salvage" is provided, and another can be
gained if support for more file systems such as MAC-OS and NetBSD is
integrated.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

		Copyright 1996, Markus Illenseer

	This review represents my honest opinion; your mileage may
vary, so tell me about it!  If you use this review in any way -
republishing for example, the author requests at least a copy of the
used media.  Commercial reuse is prohibited unless written permission
is given.

	You can contact the author at:

		Markus Illenseer
		Rathenaustr. 75
		33102 Paderborn
		GERMANY

		[email-masked]
		http://www.teuto.de/~markus/

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