retrocomputing

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Let's talk about the curious and ingenious DriveSpace, an MS-DOS program promising to double the available disk space. (raduzaharia.medium.com)

submitted 1 year ago by raduzaharia@lemmy.sdf.org to c/retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org

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[–] Decipher0771@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

DOS has always? had chkdsk, but ndd had a knack for being able to recover data from minor corruptions way better than chkdsk did. Scandisk (dos 6 version of chkdsk) was just a prettier face, ndd was still better.

Between ndd, Spinrite, and I can’t remember the name of the undelete tools, I saved a lot of homework assignments.

[–] sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

chkdsk in dos never had the ability to scan the disk surface for defects, ndd did that, and then magically scandisk showed up and looked awfully similar to ndd.

But I agree, some really great tools. And sysinfo was our de facto "how fast is this thing?" for years.

[–] Decipher0771@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

Indeed. It really was the end of an era when they went to shit.

[–] kalleboo@bitbang.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Did anyone figure out if scandisk was actually licensed from someone else? I know that lots of the other MS utils were - defrag, undelete etc