Date   : Tue, 16 Aug 2005 21:05:02 +0100
From   : "Ian Wolstenholme" <BBCMailingList@...>
Subject: Re: Level 3 fileserver - status...

Yes, that's right, be very, very careful with WFSInit as it ruined my
Technomatic Winchester on at least two occasions and it's no fun doing
a restore from 21 floppy discs!!!!!

The problem with WFSInit is that it takes the first free sector on the disc and
uses all the space on the disc from that point onwards as the Econet partition.

It's supposed to do a COMPACT first to make sure no data is overwritten but
most versions have these lines REMmed out.  (It's also supposed to make the
disc bootable by copying FS as !BOOT and doing a *OPT 4,2 on the disc but
again these lines seem generally to be REMmed out).

As a general statement, I wouldn't use WFSInit to partition a disc with any
valuable data on, I would copy it first and start afresh with a blank disc with
some free space reserved using *CREATE.  That way you can't lose anything.

Best wishes,



Ian

----- Original Message -----
From: Rob
To:  Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>,bbc-micro@...
Sent: Tue, 16 Aug 2005 20:39:13 +0100
Subject: RE: [BBC-Micro] Level 3 fileserver - status...

At 14:54 16/08/2005, Jules Richardson wrote:

>Problem now is that there appears to be no SYST account and I have no
>clue as to what other user accounts may be on the disk. Rob, does your
>util (mentioned yesterday) dump out the account / password data from a
>file server partition, or can't it go into that level of detail?
Sorry, it's more of a "Is this a fileserver disc?" type 
utility.  Identifies when it was created, etc.  It does start reading a map 
of sectors used, for recovery use, but this version of the prog doesn't 
actually use it.


>Any other options for doing this before I try and take a raw image of
>the drive on a modern system and look for data fragments which look like
>user/password info?

Ian's message of 21:55 last night sounds like he knows what he's talking 
about.  I'd just add: ensure you power down/disconnect the winchester while 
running WFSInit to make sure you don't overwrite the wrong disc...

... I have a copy of WFSInit 1.00 "with lots of bits by PLJones, 1988" 
according to the comments, just in case it's of use.  (Seems to offer a lot 
of options, not sure how many the original version does!!)


Rob.