FANTASTIC! Indeed, thank you, Olaf. You know we all want to hear about it.
Bit of a dry subject, I suppose... Well, somebody asked for it
The new Disk Doctor is the result of some hairy research into how the original version worked and why it failed. Commodore stopped shipping it with Workbench 2.1, and since then no file system repair or data recovery tool has been included with subsequent Workbench versions for Amigas with 68000 family CPUs.
The new Disk Doctor should solve a couple of hairy problems. Volumes can be much larger than they used to be in the 1980'ies and 1990'ies. Not only do you have to deal with storage media much larger than 4 Gigabytes, the number of files, directories and the associated management data structures have to be analyzed and their contents need to be kept in memory. Memory constraints are the biggest problem here, actually. The original Disk Doctor needed about 1.5% the size of the volume as working memory (RAM). For example, in order to "repair" a 20 Megabyte hard disk partition, you would have to have at least 330 Kilobytes of free RAM available. This would not fly on the original Amiga 500/1000/2000. Now imagine how the math would work out for a 1 Gigabyte hard disk partition. For the new Disk Doctor I developed a special type of data structure which lowers the memory requirements to around 0.1% of the volume size. Which means that about 1 Megabyte may be sufficient to deal with a 1 Gigabyte partition, and 8 Megabytes for an 8 Gigabyte partition. At least, this is what testing revealed so far.
Unlike the original Disk Doctor, the new version does not currently modify the contents of the volume. It only does two things: 1) examine the contents of the volume, looking for defects and 2) copy the contents of the directory tree to a different volume. It does what Dave Haynie's DiskSalv program did 32 years ago, but of course it does a lot more than that
The "examination" begins by looking into every single block of the volume, taking note of the contents, the type of data found, damage to the contents. This is followed by another pass to figure out what files, directories, hard links and soft links exist and can be reached through the root directory (if there is one). Finally, this information is tied together so that one can tell which files, directories, etc. are still "sound" and undamaged, which ones are deleted, damaged or "orphaned", i.e. have no valid parent directories.
This information can be stored in a "disk and block information" (DABI) database file (actually, it's just a gzip-compressed plain text file) which might just become useful later. Instead of rerunning the examination (which takes quite a while to complete on a large volume), you can reuse the information gathered later.
You can use the new Disk Doctor just to check if a volume is in good shape, and not bother with the DABI files or the copying operation. But there's a lot more you can do. For example, you could use the DABI file to have Disk Doctor show you what it would have copied and then narrow down the set of files to copy through very simple filter restrictions (e.g. copy only "sound" files, copy only damaged files, copy only deleted files, copy only files matching a wildcard pattern). The copy process itself works very much like a "copy all clone #? .." command would, preserving all the properties (comment, user/group ID, modification time) of the original directory entries. When damaged files are copied, the damaged sections are skipped. The copy will retain the entire directory tree structure, if possible.
The new Disk Doctor takes a very thorough look at the state of the volume and its data structures. This includes, for example, making sure that all directories are consistent. It's possible for directory entries to show up when you list the directory contents, yet remain inaccessible when you try to open or delete them. The linkage information underlying hard links to directories and files is validated, too. Cycles in the many list data structures which the file system uses are detected. The root directory and its associated data structures (e.g. the bookkeeping information on what blocks are still available for use) are examined, too, which covers the bitmap extension block information. The extension blocks were added in 1987 with the introduction of the FFS. Their "Achilles heel" is the lack of a checksum which would make detection of corruption easier. The directory cache lists which give the directory cache (DCFS) file system variant its name are validated, too, and any differences found between a directory and the cache contents are recorded.
All this information is in part intended for a repair operation which is currently not implemented. A repair strategy would be needed first, and I have yet to come up with one. The more I learned about what can go wrong the more alternatives to dealing with the defects revealed themselves. You may be able to correct the smaller problems, such as restoring the consistency of directories, but if the root directory is damaged, how do you rebuild its bookkeeping information without destroying other data that might still be recoverable? So, after four months of work, this is still a research project, I'm afraid.
Finally, in case you wondered, the new Disk Doctor supports all Amiga file system variants which stem from the 1986 ROM file system and the 1987 Fast file system. This includes the international mode (introduced with Workbench 2.1), the directory cache mode (introduced with Kickstart 3.0) and the long name mode (introduced with AmigaOS 4). Hard links and soft links are supported (currently only soft links are restored by the copy operation, restoring the hard links still needs work). Volume block sizes of 512..65535 bytes per block are supported, too.
I can't promise you that using the new Disk Doctor will be an enjoyable experience (ha!), but it should be a whole lot less exciting than it used to be with the old Disk Doctor. If you need a tool to check if your volumes are sound and in good shape, and which will help you to recover data from them when you really need it, the new Disk Doctor should get the job done.
