Mail Archives: djgpp/2000/09/12/13:00:20
Damian Yerrick wrote:
> On Sun, 10 Sep 2000 13:23:40 -0700, JohnT <jrt AT inXSformatics DOT net>
> wrote:
>
> >Damian Yerrick wrote:
> >
> >> "Hidden" files and "system" files are considered by defraggers to be
> >> fixed in position so as not to break some programs' copy protection.
> >
> >But when I've done a DIR /s/ah or DIR /s/as to look for hidden and
> >system files, nothing unusual turned up as I recall. The possibility of
> >some other bit being set in a file header or something in the FAT table
> >having an odd value came to mind, but I don't have the know-how to
> >check out those ideas.
>
> Just a shot in the dark, but what about read-only files? What about
> any file recovery managers (undelete.exe, Recycle Bin, etc.) you're
> using?
The number of read-only files should not increase as one runs DOS
sessions under Windows but I haven't checked on that. I also can't
say whether Defrag treats read-only files as unmoveable. Also, not
many applications mark files as read-only in any case. Files are
deleted by changing a bit in the file header or FAT table, and Defrag
doesn't mind those---it just gets rid of the deleted entries in whatever
holds those headers. Files in the recycle bin of Win9x just stay there
until you delete them or tell Win9x to, as far as I know.
I think there are 1 or 2 reserved attribute bits in a DOS file header,
and that may be the source of the unmoveable clusters too, but
I've scanned my disk for them with a McAfee utility (dmdos.exe)
and haven't seen anything reported.
A really good book for Win95 or Win 98 is the Microsoft Technical
Reference Manual. Problem here is, the Win95 manual doesn't do
much good in understanding my Win 3.11 system! But my old trusty
software is for DOS/Win3.x, so I don't really want to convert.
John
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