LAUNDER Last updated by Roedy Green on 2007-03-11 Introduction LAUNDER is a diskette laundry. It rapidly launders (erases) diskettes and disinfects them of all viruses in a second or two. It brings old diskettes up to the latest DOS 7.0 standards. It erases all directories, files and volume labels. LAUNDER lets you rapidly recycle a pile of diskettes. Depending on your BIOS and brand of diskette drive, it will take between 1 and 6 seconds per diskette. How To Use It Just type LAUNDER A: or LAUNDER B: and follow the prompts. That is all you need to know. LAUNDER by itself is equivalent to LAUNDER A:. LAUNDER never touches hard disks. At any time you may hit the Esc key to exit LAUNDER. At any time you may hit the space bar to prod LAUNDER to look afresh at the current disk and re-launder it. As you erase each diskette, LAUNDER tells you what kind it is. It changes the background colour of the screen so that you can tell out the corner of your eye. Further it makes a distinctive tone for each type of diskette. LAUNDER will warn you with a message and "prang" tone if you have just laundered a diskette with bad clusters. You can still use the diskette, since the record of the location of bad clusters will be preserved. However, for many purposes, such as diskette duplication, you should only use perfect diskettes. Colour Code Type Size Density Format Colour AT 3«" 1.44 MB High density 18-sector GREEN AT 5¬" 1.2 MB High density 15-sector RED XT 3«" 720 KB Double density 9-sector BLUE XT 5¬" 360 KB Double Density 9-sector YELLOW XT 5¬" 320 KB ancient Double sided 8-sector VIOLET XT 5¬" 180 KB ancient Single sided 9-sector VIOLET XT 5¬" 160 KB ancient Single sided 8-sector VIOLET 2M 3«" 1.76 MB proprietary 2M 22-sector CYAN 2M 5¬" 1.41 MB proprietary 2M 18-sector CYAN 2M 3«" 984 KB proprietary 2M 12-sector CYAN VIRGIN unformatted WHITE NORTON proprietary format PINK Damaged bad media byte BLACK Norton format diskettes are were created by older versions of Norton Backup. 2M diskettes are a proprietary extended density format created my the 2M formatting program, available on download sites as 2M30.ZIP. Launder does not yet support Microsoft's or IBM's version of DMF extended density format diskettes. Trouble Shooting Windows 95 has many bugs in its floppy BIOS emulation. Sometimes it fails to provide changeline support which LAUNDER needs to tell when you have inserted or removed diskettes. If LAUNDER complains about Windows 95 failing to provide changeline support, try doing a DIR on the floppy drive and retrying LAUNDER. If that fails you can use LAUNDER in DOS mode. Sometimes rebooting clears Windows 95, and allows LAUNDER to function. Usually just one DIR gets Windows 95 on the right track until the next reboot. LAUNDER is not designed to work on the XT. Further it is not designed to work with diskette drives that don't have changeline support i.e. old 360 KB and 720 KB drives. If you try to use it on such equipment, it will apologize for its ineptitude and abort. Some AT 1.44 drives such as the Toshiba don't have standard changeline support. LAUNDER will act as if you were constantly yanking the diskettes out from under it. LAUNDER will be unusable on such machines. Sometimes after using LAUNDER, DOS will complain of an "invalid disk change". This will occur if you: a) Use Norton Cache b) Insert the first diskette before you start LAUNDER rather than waiting for LAUNDER to prompt you to insert it. c) Fail to remove the last diskette when LAUNDER asks you to. d) Use a machine or software with bugs in the BIOS (Use FBIOS.exe to determine if you have floppy BIOS bugs). Once the problem has occurred, only REBOOT will clear DOS's pea brain. To prevent the problem, either avoid Norton Cache, or be careful about inserting and removing diskettes. The problem is, Launder works behind DOS's back, using only BIOS. To DOS, a diskette appears to mysteriously change volume serial number if you have one inserted at the start and finish. If you leave LAUNDER unattended more than 20 seconds, it will turn off the diskette motors, and ask you to hit the SPACE BAR to restart it. If LAUNDER seems broken, try reading the screen and pressing the SPACE BAR as requested. If you have 3 or 4 floppy drives, you must refer to the extra drives beyond A: and B: by strange names. Use LAUNDER 3: or LAUNDER 4: rather than LAUNDER F: or LAUNDER G: or whatever DOS calls them. LAUNDER is too stupid to be able to convert the DOS names to the BIOS drive numbers it uses internally. Using Option Switches You can abbreviate option switches down to a single letter. Here are some valid examples: LAUNDER B: /Q /BootB LAUNDER /govt Here is an invalid example: LAUNDER A: quiet <-- missing / Option Switches /BootB Lays down a special boot track so that if this disk is accidentally booted from the A: drive, the system will reboot, not from C: as normal, but from the disk in B:. This would allow you for example to boot a 3.5" DOS disk in a machine with a 5.25" A: drive. You could use this to install DOS from B: if you had only the "wrong" size diskettes. Once you are booted from B:, the A: and B: drives will be swapped until the next boot. /Full Does a check that the very last sector on the diskette is formatted and readable. This helps ferret out diskettes created by a copy utility too "lazy" to properly format the entire diskette. /Full may be used in conjuction with any other options. /Government erases entire surface multiple times to make it very difficult to recover data, even with special spy analog equipment. Even with the /Government option the KGB or CIA could still probably reconstruct your data. It uses the American D.O.D. standard 5220.22M. It overwrites the data first with 0s then with 1s, then with division marks. Then it verifies the last write. This is for confidential, not secret data. This takes a long time because there are 4 complete passes over the entire disk surface. I don't have a copy of the D.O.D. standard, so I am sure if I have dotted my "i" and crossed my "t"s. If you discover it should be done slightly differently, please let me know. /Keep updates floppies with fancy auto-reboot and full DOS 6.0 disk geometry fields in the boot record, but leaves data intact -- a fast SCAT, with warning of bad tracks. Makes old disks work with new programs. It does not erase the volume label. There are two copies of the volume label on a disk, one in the directory and one in the boot record. If they do not agree, /Keep resynchronizes them to match the one in the directory. This means /Keep will automatically update to the latest standards older floppies that did not have the second volume label in the boot record. /Prompt displays the root directory and waits for keyboard go-ahead before erasing. /Prompt can also be used with /Keep so that you might avoid making a bootable disk unbootable. /Quiet no sound. Turns off all sound effects so that you can use LAUNDER without disturbing your neighbours. You would have to look at the screen to use LAUNDER in /QUIET mode. Normally you can run it blind using only the sound effects to guide you. /Secure erases entire surface to prevent unerase attempts. Will foil Norton Unerase and Norton DiskEdit scavenging, but will not stop the CIA. The normal LAUNDER process just erases the root directory, but leaves the file data alone, where it could be recovered Norton DiskEdit, but not with a simple UnErase. It takes 40 seconds to erase a 1.2 MB floppy with /Secure. In contrast, Format takes 70 seconds. Peter Norton's WipeInfo A:/R1 does the same thing, but it takes 6 minutes and 15 seconds. How It Works LAUNDER works by writing a new FAT and null root directory entry. This way it does not need to erase the files and directories one at a time. LAUNDER does NOT write to the data part of the diskette. If you wanted to ensure that information could never be recovered using tools like Norton DiskEdit, you would have to use the COVERUP utility on each floppy. This would take much longer than a simple LAUNDER. You can get that effect however with the /Governent or /Secure options. The BOOTB feature works by setting up a intercept to int13 to change the DL register which specifies the drive to be operated on. The boot record generated loads the boot record on the B: drive and fools it into thinking it was just booted. BOOTB hides the code to swap A: and B: right in the interrupt vector table at int 50H. This may conflict with other software. You can move it elsewhere by changing the StealInt configuration constant an reassembling. Benefits 1. LAUNDER is faster than any other method of erasing diskettes. Even when the diskettes have many branching subdirectories, LAUNDER erases them out just as quickly. It takes 1 to 6 seconds per diskette, almost as fast as you can shovel them in. In contrast, reformatting them would take about 70 seconds. 2. LAUNDER is very easy to use. No training is required. For the most part you can use it without even looking at the screen or touching the keyboard. Because of the colour coding and sound, even legally blind people can use it too. 3. LAUNDER removes all viruses (both known and unknown) from the floppy as it erases. 4. LAUNDER updates your diskettes, putting DOS 6.0-style volume serial numbers, disk geometry information etc. on the boot track. Diskettes formatted a long time ago without this full information confuse some new programs. Humours PC DOS and OS/2 by putting "IBM" in as the OEM. 5. If you accidentally boot with a floppy treated by LAUNDER, it automatically reboots from hard disk, often faster than had no floppy been there at all. 6. LAUNDER tells you what kind of floppy you have, including Norton Proprietary format backup diskettes. You can then sort them into piles for recycling. It also provides running counts for each type. 7. Decontaminates FastBack Plus diskettes of the "unvirus". LAUNDER prepares partly-compatible FastBack Plus and Norton Backup diskettes for re-use as 100% compatible DOS diskettes. 8. LAUNDER warns you about bad tracks, so you can discard imperfect disks, but it also preserves that information, if you decide to reuse imperfect disks. DOS Format.Exe loses track of which spots have been found to be bad in past, though it does do a full surface test, something LAUNDER does NOT do. 9. LAUNDER can be run in the background in a Windows or DESQview window. You don't even need to make its visible to use it. Status When you register you get the latest version with source. Ideas for future Registered version of LAUNDER /Broken for AT machines that don't have changeline support. You will likely often have to hit the space bar to prod LAUNDER along, especially if you accidentally insert a virgin diskette. Windows 95 sometimes mucks up changeline support too. /Model:filename you provide your own boot model, sample disk or 512-byte file to customize the message when you accidentally boot from floppy. CUSTOMIZER program to let you patch in your own messages for the standard reboot code. /Number:1 counter that stops LAUNDER after processing N disks -- usually 1 so you could use LAUNDER to ensure a blank, formatted diskette is inserted. FANCY fancier screen layouts -- boxes & stuff. /Coverup like Jay Vanderbilt's CoverUp. Erases file tails and empty space, but leaves drive data intact. Hides information on disk that is supposedly erased. Like /Keep, it also sexes up the boot tracks. Equivalent to /Keep plus /Secure. You could also do /Keep plus /Government to just seriously erase the data on the unused part of he disk. /Unix Erase Unix disks that are missing media bytes, FATS and root directories. Pays no attention to the media bytes currently on the disks. It classifies disks by trying to read the extreme "corners" of the disk. Noisier and slower than regular laundering. Also can be used for DOS diskettes when disk boot tracks are badly scrambled. DUAL ability to switch is midstream back and forth between A: and B:. You have to hit a key to switch. You can't shovel disks into both drives at once. Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products #101 - 2536 Wark Street Victoria, BC Canada V8T 4G8 tel:(250) 361-9093 mailto:roedyg@mindprod.com http://mindprod.com -30-