This low level utility does raw disk manipulation on disk drives.  Individual sectors of the floppy or hard disks can be edited using this software.  This is a data recovery package.  You can view the files and folders on a FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 based system much like what a file manager does but completely from the low level without the Operating System support.
The chief benefit of this package is that it allows you to take backup of critical areas of your hard disks to a floppy disk, so that in case of data corruption due to a virus or intentional crash or due to hardware failure, you can retrieve all or part of the data from your disks, and undelete of files/folders that have been deleted accidentally or by virus!
There is a tree view on the left side which lists all of the physical drives in the system.  Hard disk starts with Hard Disk 1 .....  Floppy disks start with Floppy Disk 1 .....
You can expand the drives to view its various contents.  The contents will be logical drives for the hard disks and for the floppy disks it begins with FAT 1.  They can be further expanded or viewed.
In the menu there are various functions.  The Action Menu is the most important one.  The Refresh Disk will reset the tree view control with all the items that appear during the startup.
Backup Critical Areas will backup the critical areas of the hard disk to the floppy disk.  The critical areas include Partition Tables, Boot Records, FATs, Root Directory.  These are written to the floppy starting at the data area.  No root entries are created and FAT areas of the floppy disk are not updated, which means that all the data in the floppy are overwritten even when all its root entries are preserved.  Its the users duty to quick format the floppy disk before taking the backup.
Restore Critical Areas will restore the critical areas from a floppy disk to the hard disk.  This feature is helpful if your hard disk is affected because of a virus or because of hardware failure.  The contents of the hard disk can be recovered using the restore procedure.
Goto Sector will goto a specific logical sector within a logical disk.  This feature only works in the Raw Sector Dumping mode.
Sector/Cluster dumping will do a hexadecimal dumping of the files/folders instead of writing them in thier format like Root Directory, Boot Record etc.  This feature is useful if you want to change specific bytes within a sector/cluster.
Raw Sector Dumping will do a raw sectorwise dumping of the logical disk.  You can view the entire hard disk using this method rather than file by file or folder by folder.
Then in the Changes menu, Write Changes will write the specific sector to the disk.  You can even change the partition tables, boot records, FAT etc.  Be careful when you use it.
If any of the method activation freezes your PC then be patient as heavy calculation is in progress.  For eg. displaying FAT 1 or 2 on a FAT32 based disks may appear to freeze the PC quite for some time.  This is because the volume of information to be processed may be larger.

Vinoj Kumar
Mother Nature Software
148, Konnur High Road,
Ayanavaram
Madras - 600023.
INDIA.

E-Mail:  vinoj@eth.net, vinoj@vsnl.net
