China DOS Union

As everyone knows, disks are a very important storage device in today’s computers, and people normally can’t use a computer without them. Therefore, properly maintaining disks and protecting the data on them is very important, especially the three most important parts of a disk—the boot sector, the file allocation table (FAT), and the master boot record (MBR). If there is no backup at all, then when mistaken operations, viruses, or other causes lead to problems such as the disk failing to boot normally, it will be too late for regret. So it is absolutely necessary to keep backups of them and know how to restore them.

There are quite a few tools for saving/restoring these parts of a disk. The SRCTools introduced in this article is a very powerful and practical one, and it can be downloaded from the “Disk Tools” section of this site. It is a very new program, so it fully supports all kinds of FAT partitions, including FAT12/FAT16/FAT32, and it also supports large hard disks. Some older similar tools, such as STBFP, do not support these. SRCTools consists of three files: SRCBOOT, SRCFAT, and SRCMBR. They are respectively used to operate on the disk’s boot sector, file allocation table (FAT), and master boot record (MBR). Their usage is all very simple and very similar (after all, they are one piece of software), namely:

SRCBOOT drive-letter filename parameter

SRCFAT drive-letter filename parameter

SRCMBR hard-disk-number filename parameter

Among them, the parameter specifies the operation to perform. There are the following three types:

/S: Save operation.
That is, save the contents of the boot sector/FAT/MBR to a file.
/R: Restore operation.
That is, restore the contents saved in the file back into the boot sector/FAT/MBR.
/C: Compare operation.
That is, compare and check the contents saved in the file against the current contents of the boot sector/FAT/MBR.

In the command line, the drive letter can be the letter of any physical drive, such as C:, D:, etc.; the hard disk number specifies which hard disk is to be operated on—for example, hard disk 0 means the first hard disk, hard disk 1 means the second hard disk, and so on; the filename is the file specified for the above save/restore/compare operation.

For example, suppose you want to save the contents of the boot sector of drive C to a file named FILE1. In this case, the drive letter is C:, and the filename to operate on is FILE1, so you only need to execute the command "SRCBOOT C: FILE1 /S". Another example: if you want to restore the master boot record (MBR) contents saved in file FILE2 to the first hard disk (that is, disk 0), then you can execute the command "SRCMBR 0 FILE2 /R". If you want to compare the file allocation table (FAT) contents saved in file FILE3 with the current FAT contents of drive D to check whether they are correct, then executing the command "SRCFAT D: FILE3 /R" will achieve this function.

See, isn’t it very convenient and practical to use? Everyone may as well try it, to make disk maintenance more convenient and efficient.

Article taken from "新DOS時代" http://newdos.yginfo.net/

It would be nice if it could back up the FDT. FDT is also very important.

Does it support NTFS?

I like NU:

This is NU8.0, right? Not sure whether it’s suitable for current disk formats....

NU8.0 is not suitable for current disk formats

BFHF is also pretty good!

I just can’t download it no matter what, Urgent!
..............
I searched online until two o’clock last night before finally finding it, really hard to bear taking it out! Hehe

[ Last edited by ytfy on 2006-9-23 at 09:12 ]

Originally posted by ytfy at 2006-9-22 13:14:

I searched online until two o’clock last night before finally finding it, really hard to bear taking it out! Hehe

[ Last edited by ytfy on 2006-9-23 at 09:12 ]

Thanks to this person.

SRCTOOLS’s main advantage is that it is very small, but it has many limitations, such as not being able to back up NTFS partition information, not being able to back up the partition table chain, so the partition table backed up with it cannot restore logical drive partitions, etc..
To break through these limitations, I suggest trying miniTO. Besides including all the functions of SRCTOOLS, it also has ten major features.

1
All functions are in one program
2
Supports backing up partition tables of any file system (including LINUX, etc., using GHOST’s numeric method to represent partitions) and NTFS partition information such as DBR (also using GHOST’s numeric method to represent partitions; additionally, if NTFSPRO/IFS is loaded, drive letters can also be used directly)
3
Supports backing up the partition table chain of all hard disks and any hard disk, and supports global comparison
4
Supports copying FAT32’s system-provided DBR backup into the DBR
5
Supports drive letters for NTFS/LINUX after loading NTFSPRO/IFS
6
Supports using numeric form to represent partitions, breaking through the limitations of FAT partitions, consistent with GHOST
7
Supports conversion display between numerically represented partitions and drive-letter represented partitions
8
Supports use together with DOS batch files
9
Supports backing up CMOS and generating CMOS passwords
10
Supports displaying the hard disk table and overall partition table

Its functions greatly surpass the similar tool dosBACK that I wrote before ...

For details, please see:
http://www.cn-dos.net/forum/viewthread.php?tid=29715&page=1&sid=dFMrdo#pid192616

[ Last edited by GOTOmsdos on 2007-4-23 at 01:12 AM ]