================================================
adfchk v0.2.2 by A. Eibach (c) 2007 - 2010 03 Dec 2009
================================================
----------
INTRO
----------
A long-time spare-time project of mine has finally MATERIALIZED!
This tool makes it possible to check ADFs (Amiga Disk Files) without needing
any Amiga tool at all!
A software like this is necessary because the amount of ADFs has exponentially
increased in these almost 15 (!) years of UAE (Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator)
development.
Floppy emulation is more and more accurate and sometimes simply must be slowed
down to correctly read every sector, especially with alien format disk images.
Now imagine you've got 1,000 ADF images on your hard disk and you need to
check them! A possible way is to use one of the excellent checking programs
like Dave Haynie's DiskSalv[TM] and probably be unable to finish your checking
task within 1 month! :->
That's when ADFCHK comes into place.
You can either use it by MENU with ONE file (NOTE: there's no shiny file
selection
yet) or use the supplied BATCH file(s) (sorry, Windows only for now, a shell
script
for bash is in the works!) for t h o u s a n d s of files!!
The BAT file took days to finish and lo' and behold, it is not one of your
commonly known run-of-the-mill batch files!!
----------------------------
WHAT adfchk CAN DO
----------------------------
- find boot and data block checksum errors on AmigaDOS disks, writing the exact
location (cylinder, surface, sector) into a log file
[Also scans NDOS disks, but I'm planning to keep the logging to a minimum
for this disk type]
- detect three types of the LAMER virus which randomly infects single sectors,
destroying them irreversibly by writing its name across the WHOLE sector;
now also supports a bunch of boot viruses and a small amount of file viruses
(LINK viruses are in the works, since this is no easy task)
- avoid bogus "checksum errors" by properly reading the disk's bitmap; only
errors on blocks which are USED and KNOWN to the AmigaDOS file system
are reported as actual "checksum errors"
- scan within ZIP (and since 0.2.0: DMS!) archives for ADFs; even supports
partly broken ZIPs, e. g. if Disk 1 is an underdump (<880K), it will be
skipped, but Disk 2 will be checked anyway.
------------------------------
NEW FEATURES IN VERSION 0.2.2:
------------------------------
None. Only (albeit important) code fixes and some cosmetic things with
command-line output.
------------------------------
NEW FEATURES IN VERSION 0.2.1:
------------------------------
- DMS file support!! (please consider this still EXPERIMENTAL)
(CAUTION: there is a RARE behavior which will sometime lock up ADFCHK with
very large
DMS archives; I still do not know why this happens. It never happened with
ZIP trees,
be they as huge as possible...)
- BOOT block virus detection support:
Byte Bandit (3 variants supported [NB: encoded ones to come]), Byte Warrior,
Joshua 1 + 2, Pentagon Circle 1 + 2, Little Sven, Eleni 1 (MessAngel-B),
Sepultura, Leviathan
- FILE virus detection support:
Jeff/Butonic (versions 1.31 + 3.10), SADDAM/IRAK
- Detection of special disk formats/signatures:
-- Rob Northen Copylock disks (DosType = 'RNC')
-- Quarterback backup sets (DosType = 'Qb'+number or 'QB'+number)
- Format-independent DMS transfer error detection (DMS!!ERR; will also handle
NDOS disks)
- Deep-checking (automatic) of DATA blocks; now also detects errors of:
-- Bad sequence numbers
-- Bad nextData pointers
-- Bad validData values (greater than 0x1E8 or less than 0x01)
(NOTE: Deep checking is auto-disabled for blocks with illegal header key
numbers,
in order to prevent misdetections!)
----------------------------
"TODO-LIST" (WHAT adfchk CANNOT DO (YET))
----------------------------
- decode SADDAM-infected blocks and optionally write the corrected results
back to the images
- proper LINK-virus detection (this will require me to write an extra routine
for hunk handling)
----------------
NEW SINCE 0.1.3:
----------------
- support for extended ADFs (detection only for now)
- support for over- and underdumps; no more interactive key-pressing in batch
mode
- scanner now uses _XXXX suffixes to tag the log files which makes it easier to
isolate the actually erroneous
- lots of phony reports of "checksum errors in data blocks" eliminated by better
and deeper checking of data block structures and expected AmigaDOS properties.
---------------
NEW SINCE RC2:
---------------
- supports block types (file list, header, user directory, formatted,
unknown...)
- standard type recognition works now (FFS + INTL/NO INTL, DIRCACHE etc.)
- FFS detection support (it makes no sense to check FFS disks for "checksum
errors",
since FFS does not use checksums for data blocks
- fixed lots of misdetections and phony reports of "checksum errors"
- lots of minor tweaks, code cleanups and fixes.
------------
INSTALLATION
------------
Nothing to "install" here: only make sure that LiteUnzip.dll is in the
current path!! (when I really feel the need to, I could code it a little
better and force the tool into a crippled mode where you can only test
plain .ADF's whenever the DLL cannot be found, but this is only a "maybe", since
there are much more important things to do first)
------------
USAGE
------------
Usage is very simple:
[win32]
adfchk.exe [-f <file name> [-l <log file>][-b(atch mode)]]
[linux]
./adfchk [-f <file name> [-l <log file>][-b(atch mode)]]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------
| NOTE: Unlike RC1 and earlier versions, the application will now auto-enter
| menu mode due to a lot of user requests. If and only if the '-b' option is
specified
| AND a filename is given, a non-interactive batch mode will be used.
| This also made some changes necessary in the four *.BAT files.
|
| ADDITIONAL NOTE: Do not be surprised if the batch header gets suppressed if
the -l
| option was specified. This is DELIBERATE behavior, since I do not want to have
the
| header displayed a few thousand times when unattendedly scanning huge
archives.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------
[INTERACTIVE MODE]
- Type "adfchk" on command line - a MENU opens:
(1) Purpose of the program -> get another boring text what the program is for
(2) Read ADF into buffer -> load ADF from hard disk into memory
[NOTE: at this stage, file MUST be called DEFAULT1.ADF - a file selection menu
is planned, though!]
(3) Check directory structure of ADF in buffer [DOES NOTHING YET at the
moment]
(4) Check for block checksum errors on disk image->check image, which must now
be in memory buffer
(5) Quit
Results will be in ADFCHK.LOG on the current directory.
[BATCH MODE]
This is the mode you will probably use very frequently, as with 1,000 images
and more, it would be a very awkward procedure to check those in interactive
mode!
The program detects the -f option, which specifies a filename and then will
go automatically into batch mode.
The -l option can also specify a log file instead of the default file
"ADFCHK.LOG".
This is the only reasonable way to get a bunch of logs.
Example:
adfchk -f blah.adf -l blah.log -b
will log the checking results of 'blah.adf' to the file 'blah.log'.
[MASS BATCH MODE]
Since it will still take a whale of a time to implement a recursive search
through directories that will work on BOTH Linux and Windows (which is my
goal!!), I've written a very nifty BAT file (Windows only for now, sorry!)
which is able to RECURSIVELY scan each and every directory starting from the
current one. Yes, indeed for 1,000 ADFs, it will be run exactly a thousand
times in sequence. But since it is so small, it won't take much memory;
however, CPU usage will go quite high when the script is running through
thousands of files: this is normal.
To make use of mass batch mode, do this:
[WINDOWS ONLY]
First of all, you must make sure that save from the appropriate .BAT file,
both
- ADFCHK.EXE
and
- LiteUnzip.dll
must be in the directory from which you want to start the scan.
run:
CHKADF.BAT to test ADF files (and only ADF files)
CHKZIP.BAT to test ADF files inside ZIP archives (and only ADFs inside)
CHKALL.BAT to test both standalone ADF files and ADF files inside ZIP
archives
[RESULTS OF MASS BATCH MODE]
When the .BAT file has finished scanning (which can take easily half an hour
with
5,000 files!), it will put lots of ADF????.LOG files into the .logs subdirectory
relative to the directory from where you started the search.
Unfortunately, in the .BAT solution I was forced to do this, because writing
everything to ONE log file would make the file that big so that *most* editors
would call it quits. (500 MB is no joke, but possible! Mind you, this is ten
thousands of lines!!)
------------
TODO-LIST
------------
- search recursively by running the tool once, accessing all subdirectories
recursively from start directory in both Windows and Linux
- check for in-block errors (wrong sequence numbers with files, illegal header
keys etc.); however, this will require a ...
- ... linked list for the directory tree.
- better handling of NDOS disks (ADFCHK should _no_ longer complain about 1760
checksum errors
in log file with a DD disk that is completely in alien format.)
------------
THANKS TO
------------
- M. Kalms for his invaluable tips and patience during development
- JL Gailly and Mark Adler for zlib (although I'd like to see built-in ZIP
support
without contributor's code)
- Gilles Vollant for coding the 'miniunz(ip)' tool which showed how to unzip
contents
of a ZIP archive to hard disk using zlib
- Jeff Glatt  CodeProject.COM for his LiteUnzip.DLL which finally made
unzipping to MEMORY a walk
in the park
- 'Oddbod' (EAB) for contributing the Linux Makefile - and for constructive
criticism and
reasonable suggestions
- Someone else for letting me use his private server to get the whole TOSEC
collection
(to have something to play with; you know who you are :))
------------
LICENSE
------------
adfchk is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but AS-IS, WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY
and without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
See the GNU General Public License v2 (LICENSE / LICENSE.txt in the package) for
more
details.
------------
WEB SITE
------------
ADFCHK has finally found a new home on SourceForge:
http://adfchk.sourceforge.net/
-----------------
CONTACT AUTHOR
-----------------
You can contact me under a e i b a c h.ML g ma il .c o m.
I will listen to your flames, roars of rage, as well as appreciate any feedback,
suggestions, fixes, patches ...
|
