Diamond Edge 2.5

by Edward S. Baiz

Hello once again Atari fans. I would like to talk about another great program for the Atari line of computers. That program is Diamond Edge, which is a disk management tool previously distributed by Oregon Research. Right now in the UK, Diamond Edge is now distributed by Atari Workshop. Elsewhere in the world it is available from your local Atari dealer or directly from Anodyne Software. I will admit, however, that when Diamond Edge first came out I did not buy it. I already owned DiamondBack III (the great backup utility) from Oregon Research and HD Sentry (the hard disk repair utility) from Chro-Magic Software. HD Sentry worked great on my STE under regular TOS, but when I tried to use it on my Hades under MagiC, it crashed it almost every time. I needed something that would be more reliable under MagiC and MiNT. So when Anodyne came out with a newer version of Diamond Edge that was supposed to work well under MagiC/MiNT, I bought it and I will say that it runs just fine on the Hades under MagiC/MiNT.

I want to say first that it will be impossible for me to talk about every aspect of this great program. I will try to hit as many points as I can to give you a picture on just how good this program is. Your best bet is to actually try it out for yourself either from a demo (not sure if this exists) or on a friend's computer. If you have used other utility programs like this, then it should be much easier for you to understand its greatness.

The first thing I would like to mention is some of the many features of Diamond Edge, just to give you an idea of what it can do. It can optimize partitions for better reading or writing. This is a must for any program of this type. It can copy partitions either as an image or with defragmentation. It can zero, unzero or wipe out partitions. This feature comes in handy for those times when some weird data on a partition cannot be deleted and causes the partition to be unusable. Disk structure can be tested and repaired. It supports FAT12 (floppy) or FAT16 (hard disk) file systems. Partition sizes upto 1 GB are supported depending on the operating system used. I hope this feature will be updated to support bigger partitions since the upper end Atari computers have gone beyond the 1 GB partition size. Undeletion of files (even fragmented ones) is possible. If there is a SCSIDRV driver present, extra features are added to Diamond Edge like partitioning of hard disks, and save and restore partitioning information. Also, both Atari and ICD partitioning schemes are supported. As you can see from the features mentioned, this program is dynamite and deserves to be in every Atari computer owner's collection.

When Anodyne took over Diamond Edge, the program was at version 2.04, but now it is 2.54 since it had not seen an upgrade in years. Besides some necessary bug-fixing, some newer features have been added which deserve some mentioning. CD devices are now detected when the program boots up and are eliminated from display or selection in the various parts of the program. Devices on buses other than the standard Atari ACSI/SCSI/IDE are accessible through the use of the SCSIDRV interface. The file and help viewer has been completely rewritten and now supports scrolling backwards as well as forward. To make things easier to read, the background color of dialogs has been changed to light gray. Partition sizes are now validated before the new partition table is written to disk. There are improvements that can be read over at the Anodyne web site, but you can see just just how much Diamond Edge has come from version 2.04 and how dedicated Anodyne is in giving us a good and solid program.

When Diamond Edge is first booted up you get a screen that looks like this:

This is basically disk information about the active drive (partition or floppy) which always starts out as the "C" drive. For the average user the most important points displayed would be the "Percentage disk full" and "Total bytes" (Used and Free). For the more serious user there are other date values displayed like bytes per sector, sectors per cluster, total sectors, root sectors and more. At the bottom of this screen are icons which are each labeled on top with their specific utility name. Clicking on one of these icons will take the user to a different screen and the corresponding utility. Also, if you look at the bottom of each icon you will see the the keyboard equivalents that will also take you to the utility you want to use. Of course if you do not want to use the icons, Diamond Edge also allows you to access the program's different utilities through the drop-down menu display.

Lastly, going back to the icons, the icon on the far left shows the active drive (partition or floppy). The active drive is the drive Diamond Edge is currently working on. To change to another active drive, just click on the drive letter and you will get a display of all the active drives choices you have on your computer system. Another easier and faster way to change the active drive is to just press the drive letter on your keyboard that matches the partition/floppy you want to look at.

If, however, you want information about the hard drive as a whole you can click on the "All Info" icon or else press the [Alternate]+[A]. If you do, you will see a screen that looks like this:

This screen will let you see and compare the amount of data on each partition of your hard drive. The data is displayed as total bytes, used bytes, free bytes and % free. At the bottom is a grand total for each data section which gives you a very quick look at how much data you have on your entire hard drive.

Have you ever deleted a file and realized you made a mistake? Not too many programs in the Atari world allow you to undelete a file, but Diamond Edge is one of those special programs that makes this possible. If you did not know already, when you delete a file from a floppy or hard disk, the file is not actually erased from the computer medium. It is still there, but after the deletion process the computer replaces the first character in the file name with another character that looks like an "O" with a little flag at its top. This character tells the computer that if it needs more disk space to do an application, it can overwrite this file without asking the user. This means that if you wait too long to undelete a file, you may not be able to recover it. All the clusters of a file must be untouched in order for it to be undeleted. To get to the undelete screen of Diamond Edge either press [Alternate]+[U] on your keyboard or click on the "Undelete" icon in Diamond Edge. When you do the screen will look like this:

Notice that all the files have the word "Yes" to the right of them. This means that the file is recoverable. To recover a file, just click on the name and then the "Undelete" icon in the undelete screen. You will then be asked to replace the first letter of the file name with a letter or number. Now there a couple of nice features here. You can click on more than one file if you want. I have another little program from Atari that allows undeletion of only one file at a time. Not very good if you delete a folder with 40 or 50 files that you want back. This actually happened to me. The other nice feature is the "Find deleted/Find next" option. Maybe you accidently deleted a file or files and cannot remember where they originally were. This addition to the application really makes it shine and I find myself using it more and more.

Another important feature of Diamond Edge is its ability to display information about a partition's fragmentation level. To access this feature either click on the "Frag Map" icon or hit [Alternate]+[M] on your keyboard. When you do, you will get a screen that looks like this:

As you can see you get a lot of information displayed. The map gives you an indication of how the information on your partition is dispersed. The gray, in the map represents the partition's free space, the green is the used space and the red is fragmented data. This means the program/file is split into more than one segment. Because of this it would take the computer a little longer to run a program or use a file. Besides the fragmentation map there are other useful bits of information displayed on this screen. In the upper-left in the gray area you have the number of folders/files and most important, the number of fragmented files. Below this is a bar graph consisting of "% of Files" versus "File Size". Some of the bars are colored as to how many fragments they have. The white areas indicate the file/program have no fragments. If a file is separated into two parts, then it has one fragment, into three parts it has two fragments and so forth. This gives the user a very good idea as how things are with this partition and if it needs to be fixed. As you can see from the screen-shot, my "C" partition has some fragmentation and there is some free disk space in between the used space. This information tells me that it needs some attention.

If you decide your partition needs to be fixed (or optimized) you just click on the "Optimize" icon or [Alternate]+[O] on your keyboard. When you activate this screen Diamond Edge will give you two warnings:

1. It will let you know that deleted files on the active partition you are going to optimize will less likely be recoverable
2. It will tell you that it is a good idea to back up the partition before proceeding.

The backup idea is a must. You never know when something might go wrong when you are optimizing like a power outage. If this happens and you do not have a backup, you are toast. You can optimize for faster reading or faster writing. If you choose faster reading, the allocated used space will be moved to the front of the partition. If you choose faster writing, the allocated used space is moved to the end of the partition and the free space is moved to the front. It is easy to understand how both situations work. With the allocated used space closer to the FAT, this would mean faster reading. With the free space closer to the FAT, this would mean faster writing. One last thing, Diamond Edge also give the user an option to optimize more than one partition at a time. Just go under the drop-down menu "Optimize" and down to the option, "Optimize Multiple". Then you go to a screen where you can choose which partitions you want to be optimized. This is something HD Sentry did not have and is a time-saver if you want your whole hard drive to be fixed at one time.

Another great and useful feature of Diamond Edge is its ability to mirror SCSI and disk information. You can access this under the "Undelete" menu. To start, go to the option "Save Disk Mirror" option. Here you can choose which partitions you want to mirror. After you make your choice you are asked where you want the files to be stored. When you create a mirror, you are saving very important information, namely the partition's boot sector, FAT and root directory. I cannot count the times I was copying something to a partition only to have the FAT get messed up. Most of the time I had to re-initiate the partition which resulted in a loss of data. To use the disk mirror option you first need a program called DMIRROR.PRG which goes in your AUTO folder. This program is included on the Diamond Edge master disk. You use Diamond Edge to configure Diamond Mirror by going to the "Configure Mirror" option under the "Undelete" drop-down menu. Here you need to tell Diamond Edge where your disk mirror files are, which partitions you want to test and mirror and how often you want to do this (every start-up, once a day, once a week). When you save this configuration, an information file will be created in the AUTO folder for Diamond Mirror to use. To create a SCSI mirror, go to the "Save SCSI Mirror" option. You will get a list of all SCSI drive devices. Just highlight the ones you want to mirror. Diamond Edge will create a file that will contain how the devices was partitioned. Both of these options help to make sure none of your precious data will be lost.

The help feature is another part of Diamond Edge I should talk about. At the very right of the drop-down menu list you will find the word "Help". Its sections consist of: File [F1], Medic [F2], Optimize [F3], Undelete [F4] and Utility [F5]. These correspond to the other drop-down menu areas. When you either press the corresponding function key or use the drop-menu, you will get a screen with text that can be scrolled by using the arrow keys that gives information about the area you have chosen. This feature comes in handy since you can really mess up your hard drive if you do not know what you are doing. In fact, I used it partly to write this article. I will also mention also that Diamond Edge comes with a well-written manual that explains everything in even more detail if you need it, and I did, for this article.

Now there is one thing about Diamond Edge I should warn every user of MagiC or MiNT. It is something that prevents me from using the optimizing feature and the disk fixing feature. When Diamond Mirror runs at startup and checks all the partitions, it gives a warning that all my partitions have errors. The same goes when I run the "Test Disk" feature. The first time I used the program I went ahead and told it to fix my partition. I was in for a terrible shock. There is no real warning to this that I could see, but Diamond Edge does not like long file names. It will shorten all long file names to the standard length. I spoke to Roger about this and he is going to fix it, but first he has to upgrade ExtenDOS Gold and CDBackup (I believe this is for backing up Ext2 partitions under MintNet). HD Sentry did the same thing, so I can wait. I still highly recommend Diamond Edge. There are too many excellent programs for our computers that are still being supported and upgraded. Until next time people. Take care.

edward@myatari.net

MyAtari magazine - Review #1, February 2005