This document offers some guidance in using the DFSee product to achieve the best results possible with the least effort, and avoid some common pitfalls.
Topics covered are:
No doubt using DFSee from a bootable CDROM solves a few problems in case of disk problems.
Using it however, also introduces a few potential problems:
This is a problem for actions that want to write files into this current directory like:
The easiest way to get arround the problem is to change the current directory to a location where files can be written. This can be done from the DFSee commandline using the CD command, or from the menu using:
Note that other things like creating imagefiles or exporting the sectorlist will present a File-SaveAs dialog by default, so the current directory is of less concern. It is important of course, to select a directory that can be written to.
Because of this, the first or only diskette drive is accessible as B:, or not at all if two physical diskette drives are present. Note that the A: driveletter that will appear in the file-dialogs really represents the CDROM bootimage and can NOT be used to save files!
Another problem related to this diskette emulation mode is that it might not work on some (SCSI) systems because of subtle differences in the implementation of the El-Torrito standard used. When that happens, the symtoms might be anything from a hang during booting to simply booting from the harddisk ...
Do note that for the floppy-emulation to work, diskette-support MUST be enabled in the BIOS. So if you have a laptop without a diskette, do NOT turn that BIOS support off or the CDROM will not boot either!
While all DFSee versions share the same set of commands and menu options, and in general can perform the same actions, using a DOS environment does place some restrictions:
INT13 is a standard for low-level disk-services available at PC-startup time
(and later when running DOS).
They can reside in the system-BIOS, an additional SCSI on-board BIOS,
an on-board BIOS of other disk controllers or in software modules (disk-drivers)
that load as part of the operating system.
The original implementation of INT13 services have been limited to the
first 1024 cylinders of disk space (typically 7.8 GiB), but later implementations
called 'Extended INT13' have lifted that limitation.
Most users of computer systems these days are used to graphical userinterfaces as used on Windows, MAC or even more recent Linux systems. These interfaces are controlled using windows on your screen, a menu-system to select actions to be performed, a mouse to point at objects on that screen and the keyboard to enter text or commands. This offers very good feedback and reduces the chances of making mistakes.
The other extreme, the clasic interface used before the GUI's is the commandline interface, with the screen displaying text output by the program and the keyboard used to enter commands. This requires the users to know or learn quite a lot about the program to be able to use all available functionality.
Since it is very hard to use a GUI program from a minimal system like a boot-diskette, DFSee is not using any GUI at all, instead it uses a compromise, where windows, menus, help-screens and dialogs are used but the interface is not graphical, it is still implemented as TEXT-mode.
It its current version DFSee does NOT support or use a mouse to navigate
its user interface.
When running under a GUI (text-window) like OS/2 or Windows
you CAN use some mouse functionality like the clipboard however.
Future versions of DFSee might support the mouse for navigation as well,
and even real GUI-versions for some platforms are considered.
| Enter | when just menu-headings are visible, will open the highlighted pulldown menu |
| Enter | when a pulldown is open, will activate or execute the highlighted menu item |
| Esc | when just menu-headings are visible, will close the menu and activate the commandline |
| Esc | when a pulldown is open, will close the pulldown |
| F10 | when the menu is active, will close the menu and activate the commandline |
| F10 | when the commandline is active, will activate the menu and open the default pulldown |
| Right arrow | when a submenu-item is highlighted in a pulldown, will open that submenu |
| Right arrow | when no submenu-item is highlighted in a pulldown, will move to the next pulldown |
| Left arrow | when a submenu is opened, will close that submenu |
| Left arrow | when no submenu is opened, will move to the previous pulldown |
| Down arrow | will move the highlight to the previous menu-item in the pulldown, and wrap arround |
| Up arrow | will move the highlight to the next menu-item in the pulldown, and wrap arround at the top |
When only the menu-headings are visible, the first letter of each heading can be used as a quick-select key to open that menu-heading. Almost any other key used will open the highlighted heading. When the commandline is active the command menu x will activate the menu and open the heading with quick-select letter x.
When a pulldown menu is open, the letters that are highlighted (yellow) can be used as a quick-select key to activate (execute) that specific menu-item.
The menu behaviour can be adapted to personal taste using switches on DFSee startup:
| DFSxxx -menu- | Do not activate the menu on startup, and do not automatically re-activate it after executing a menu selection |
| DFSxxx -M:1 | Do not open submenu when using right-arrow , instead the Enter key is required to open the submenu |
| DFSxxx -M:2 | Do not automatically open pulldown menus , instead an explicit key-press is required to open the pulldown |
| DFSxxx -M:3 | Combination of -M:1 and -M:2 |
In the above DFSxxx stands for any of of the available DFSee executables for DOS, WINdows or OS2.
The nightmare for every PC user, if you find yourself looking at:
The DFSDISK functionality in DFSee is based on an extensive search
of the disk(s) for any remaining partition-tables, bootsectors or
LVM related sectors. The results of this search is stored in FOUR files
for every disk examined.
These files (DFSDISKI.*) are the basis for an analysis that may result
in the cration of a recovery script (.DFS) that will recreate the
missing or damaged partitions, and/or fix any other problems found.
Because of the complexity of the matter, and the many variations
is disk layout and filesystems, the analysis is NOT automatic and
requires someone knowledgable about disks, partitions and the
problems that may occur with them.
It is usually done by FSYS-software SUPPORT, and in that case
does require a valid registration.
There are two ways to run the DFSee DFSDISK procedure:
In case nothing was found due to geometry problems, you could use:
Based on the DFSDISKI.* information a recovery script can be created that can
simply be run from the operatingsystem command line like:
DFSxxx.exe run recover.dfs
You will most likely need assistance to do analyse the information,
and that DOES require you to have or buy
a registration!
If you have the wanted information collected in the files, you
can send them to DFSee SUPPORT at: support@dfsee.com
To save space, I advice to compress all the files before sending them,
for example to a single DFSDISKI.ZIP
If you want to attempt the analysis yourself, or simply want to learn more about
the matter you can also check the
DFSee DFSDISK descriptions and usage
You can create new partitions from the DFSee commandline using the CR command, see DFSee COMMAND overview, or from the menu as shown above.
When using the menu, the CREATE selection opens a submenu with all available freespace areas.
Only freespace areas that are large enough, and in a proper location to contain new partitions will be selectable. Freespace areas might not be selectable when:
Select the one you want to use for the new partition, and on ENTER you will be presented with a CREATE specific dialog that allows you to specify all relevant information.
The CREATE dialog allows you to specify:
For recovery purposes however, you do NOT want the bootsector to be cleared!
Find your deleted file(s) on an HPFS/NTFS partition, or find regular files
on such a partition that has become inaccessible for the operating system
(no driveletter assigned, not 'mounted'), or that has been formatted by accident.
Recover the file-data for all or selected files to another volume (driveletter).
Undelete or file-recovery in DFSee is a three to four step process:
For UNDELETE this must be an HPFS or NTFS partition, for recovery of normal files it can also be a FAT(32) partition. Select the partition using:
Depending on the current filesystem xxx you can specify part of the name for the file(s) to be found in the next dialog.
While searching, a reference will be added to the DFSee sector-list for every file found that matches this partial filename and the full path+filename for the file will be displayed together with a recovery prognosis.
Note that searching for files on a large disk, may take a very long time. Expect between less than 1 to more than 10 minutes per gigabyte, depending on the speed of your harddisk, the filesystem used and the amount of freespace.
This optional step might be useful to find out what the best wildcard is to get exactly the file(s) you need to recover. The wildcard may describe any part of the full path+filename displayed while searching, and it can contain multiple wildcard-characters:
| * | representing one or more characters in the path+filename |
| ? | representing exctly one character in the path+filename |
As an example: *mydocs*test?.doc
would display/recover all .DOC files with a name starting with test plus just one character that have mydocs somewhere in the directory path.
This will first present a dialog where you need to specify the directory where
the filedata will be recovered to. Of course this must be a writable location with
enough freespace to hold the filedata for all files to be recovered.
In this destination directory, the files will be recreated with their full
original path and filename when available, and the data for the file is copied over.
Note: For HPFS each component in the path and the filename will be limited
to a maximum of 15 characters due to the limited-length names as stored
in the file and directory FNODE structures. This limitation might be
lifted in future DFSee releases.
After specifying the destination directory, the next dialog allows you to specify a selection wildcard, exactly as with the optional display step described above.
After this the files will be recovered one by one, with progress information displayed.
For later reference and checking the results, it is advised to start a logfile before starting the recovery procedure.
Create an imagefile from the currently selected object (disk/partition)
or restore an imagefile.
Imagefiles are (binary) files that hold a complete representation of a disk-partition or even a complete disk. There use is in backup, system recovery and moving contents from one system to another. In DFSee there are two main types of imagefiles:
These are the kind of images that may be shared with other applications since it is a defacto standard. It is used a lot with diskette images, but also by Virtual-machine implementations like VPC or SVISTA as far as uncompressed disk images are used to represent the hard-disk of the virtual PC.
Note that DFSee compressed images are NOT ZIP-files! First of all, they use a slightly different compression method, and second it is not a 'file-archive' with a directory like regular ZIP-files are.
Note that to write to multiple CDROMs using DFSee, your CD-writer software
must support Streaming write mode, where the CDROM gets a diveletter
assigned that can be written to just like any other drive.
RSJ for OS/2 or Windows is such a product, and for Windows only you can use
Adaptec Easy CD creator or Roxio DirectCD (which should allow writing to DVD's too).
You can create images from the DFSee commandline using the IMAGE command, see
DFSee COMMAND overview, or from the menu as shown above.
When using the menu, or when specifying an incomplete IMAGE command, you will be presented
with an imaging specific dialog that allows you to specify all relevant information.
You can restore images from the DFSee commandline using the RESTORE command, see DFSee COMMAND overview, or from the menu using:
The restore logic will automatically handle compression, multiple files SmartUse and media-change where needed.
Copy the contents of another disk/partition to the currently selected object
(disk/partition).
This will result in an exact sector-by-sector copy called a CLONE.
Another purpose would be cloning a DAMAGED disk (bad sectors) to try and get as much data off it ass possible. To do this, make sure you check the "Fome damaged" option in the dialog, to optimize the cloning process for this purpose.
You can clone objects from the DFSee commandline using the CLONE command, see DFSee COMMAND overview, or from the menu as shown above. When using the menu, or when specifying an incomplete CLONE command, you will be presented with a cloning specific dialog that allows you to specify all relevant information.
Some of the options available are:
Note that the CLONE operation supports overlapping TO and FROM areas, so it is possible to move data WITHIN a partition or other object.
Moving or copying a partition deals with the partition contents as well as the partition information (partition-tables and LVM), and is the easiest way to do this. It 'adds' functionality to the basic CLONE command.
You can MOVE or COPY partitions from the DFSee commandline using the MOVE command (and -c option), see DFSee COMMAND overview, or from the menu using one of following selections:
The actual copying or moving of the partition data will be done using a CLONE command, and the required partitioning and LVM commands will be determined and executed where needed.