#Quarterback Tools V1.0
32 messages in this thread
I picked up a copy of Quarterback Tools yesterday. Although the program did
successfully defrag my hard drive, there were problems getting there.
First, the software does not run on my system. Tried as I did I could not
isolate the apparent incompatability problem I have with QB Tools V1.0 on
my system. I am running WB V1.32 with ARP and a number of other tasks.
Using a plain WB V1.3, I was able to run QB Tools. I also think it may have
a problem with the MOUNTMF command in CrossDOS and no telling what else.
Anyone else experience a problem with it?
Second, the program hangs a lot. At the "Ya sure you have your drive backed
up be defragging" requester, it hangs. Selecting either gadget does no
good. It also hanged after defragging. There was no apparent way to exit
out of the program. I assumed it had completed the defragging operations
since only my hard drive name was left on the screen (no files names
flashing by). I squeemishly rebooted at that point!
So, has anyone else experienced these problems? I have a compatability
problem with Quarterback too. It hangs if VirusX 4.01 is running.
Thanks for any info.
Cheers, Paul (WA1OMM)
yes I too have problems with QB tools. I am very disappointed with this pro
program. The QB disk went bad and its own tools could not recover it. I
believe that BAD is amuch better optimizer,Safer and Faster. I use a
Seagate 277n thru a starboard SCSI adapter. QB you will never have me as a
customer again if you continue with high priced junk!!
You're Not the only one having problems.
On my system, QB tools won't let me work with FLOPPIES!
Paul,
I have had Quarterback Tools for about two weeks. I have 4 A-1000 with
65 meg HardDrives each with 3 – 5 Megs of Ram each each machine is running
WB-1.32 and 1.3 ARP is installed among other things. I have NOT had a
problem in defraging ALL of the HardDrives. TOOLS worked each time without
a hitch, a hang or a Guru.
However, I wish the process was FASTER!!! I also have B.A.D. & Disk
Mechanic each do the job much quicker but they do NOT do a COMPLETE defrag
as does TOOLS. In a comparison test there was a NOTICEABLE difference in
HardDrive access times — a TOOLS defraged HardDrive being the quickest.
— Gary Lucas —
Hi Gary,
Well, here's the scoop. V1.0 will not work with V1.32 Workbench. To
quote CSS in the V1.2a release notes:
"Under Workbench V1.3.2 and earlier versions, volume reorganization
would frequently fail at the completion of the operation, even though the
volume was properly reorganized. Also, program would reporterrors on known
good floppy disks."
V1.0 of Quarterback Tools would not recognize DH10: and DH11: which
caused the failure of the program on my system. However, by calling
316-686-0870 and leaving a message with the sysop, you can obtain access to
the V1.2a release (which I did). Program works fine now.
Cheers, Paul (WA1OMM)
Paul,
That's wierd! Why it worked for me must be in the "among other things".
Anyway thanks for the info about TOOLS 1.2a I'll call and get it.
— Gary Lucas —
Gary,
How fast is Quarterback Tools and BAD? I heard that it might take hours
to defrag a 40M hard drive. If so, it would definitely be faster for me to
delete everything on my harddrive and restore to it, much faster…
John
John,
With QuarterBack TOOLS v1.00 it took 2.75 hours to OPTIMIZE (DeFrag) a
50 meg Hard Drive with 1meg ChipRam & 4megs FastRam. However, I just
received my "TOOLS" update v1.2a and Central Coast Software says that
OPTIMIZING will run a bit FASTER now — what that means I have yet to test.
With Disk Mechanic v2.5 (I haven't used BAD in many moons since Disk
Mechanic v2.5 IMHO, it's better than BAD) takes about 1.5 hours for the
same hard drive.
NO! NO, your Hard Drive would NOT be DE-FRAGED or OPTIMIZED if you
deleted everthing and did a complete restore simply because of the way
AmigaDos' FileSystem handles writing the files to your Hard Drive (this
would not accomplish a thing). Using Bad, Disk Mechanic, or QuarterBack
TOOLS will TOTALLY Re-Organize the way your files are written to your Hard
Drive which allows your Hard Drive to Access & Load them much MUCH much
FASTER! The advertising claims are improvements as much as 400% !!!
After purchasing QuarterBack "TOOLS" I did a comparison test on my
DH0: partion (25meg) with Disk Mechanic v2.5 and QuarterBack "TOOLS" v1.00
and found that QuaterBack "TOOLS" v1.00 took more than twice the time to do
the job, it in FACT, did a much more COMPLETE job, than Disk Mechanic and
that there was a SLIGHT noticeable improvement in SPEED of DISK ACCESS
times.
Optimizing is not the only function of QuarterBack "TOOLS" nor is it
the reason why I purchased it. "TOOLS" has a Hard Drive REPAIR function
that will help you repair Bad Blocks, and Recover from the DREADED DH0: not
validated System message. Both of which I have had the opportunity to use
in "TOOLS" v1.00 and has saved me about 20 hours of Low-Level Formatting,
Hard Drive reconstruction and reconstruction of lost files. These features
alone, IMHO, make "TOOLS" worth MUCH more than the retail price.
— Gary Lucas —
Gary, I used Disk Mechanic 2.5 to optimize my 80 meg hard drive and
it took just over FOUR DAYS to do the job. I used the default settings and
and have 3 meg of memory. Did I do something wrong? On floppies, I think
B.A.D. does a much better job than Disk Mechanic. I'd have used B.A.D. on
my hard drive but the program needs much memory than I have.
Leslie,
Yes, you did something wrong. You used the "default settings". I set
the Cache to 3 megs (I have 5 megs). Try a setting of 1024 or 2048 in the
Cache Setting and that WILL speed things up. Next, and most important, you
need to use TUNE-UP 2.5 or greater, I believe they are on version 2.7.
Updates are available on their BBS for registered owners.
When B.A.D. TOTALLY trashed one of my Hard Drive partitions that's when
I stopped using it. The Disk Mechanic has NEVER been a problem. However,
QuarterBack "TOOLS" IMHO, is to date the best when one does comparison
testing on the same Hard Drive with all three programs one will find (at
least I did) that they all take about the same time to Optmize, and that
QuarterBack "TOOLS" does a COMPLETE job (no remaining fragments) and the
others do NOT. Best of all, ONLY "TOOLS" will allow one to recover from
the dreaded "DH0: NOT VALIDATED" and in my case "TOOLS" actually repaired
NOT mapped out, a BAD BLOCK without doing a low-level format!
— Gary Lucas —
To this, it's probably time to raise this question:
Is 'optimization' worth the effort on an HD?
Christopher,
>"Is 'optimization' worth the effort on a HD?"
Does the SUN rise in the east?
IMHO, YES! I work in an office with 4 AMIGA's with 233 megs worth of
Hard Drives. OPTIMIZATION increases disk access up to 400%!!! And, the
programs load faster! We Optimize the Hard Drives once every eight weeks
along with a complete Hard Drive Back-Up. With 3 of the Amiga's in use 8
hours a day and the fourth about 3 hours per day, I'd say within a year's
time we probably FREE-UP at least 168 hours of work-time (one-week) that
would have been wasted WAITING for Hard Drive access and WAITING for files
to load.
— Gary Lucas —
>"…increases … access time by 400%…."
I hate to be a nuisance, but doesn't that mean that disk access is
4 times _slower_? :>
Brian,
>"…increases … access time by up to 400%…"
Means EXACTLY what it says, disk access is 400% FASTER!
~~~~~~
After one OPTIMIZES a FLOPPY or a Hard Drive when you click on the disk
icon an "OPTIMIZED DISK" loads up to 400% faster, quicker, then a
NON-optimized disk. Therefore, it saves time. Also, programs will LOAD,
start, begin… MUCH FASTER, smooth, and quite.
You need to call Central Coast Software and get the number for their
update BBS (I would give it to you but I threw it away — I have update to
v1.2a) the new version will fix your problems.
— Gary Lucas —
Gary;
While we all know what you meant….. Brian was right. What you actually
said was that access time would be four times longer.
73, bill
I can believe a figure of 400% for floppies, but not for an HD. I have an
HD setup with a diskspeed rating of 600K/sec and have tried 'optimization'
several times. Not only is it extremely risky (even if you have a backup,
you stand a chance of wasting your time restoring the HD from a garbled
state, and then possibly trying to optimize again) but improvement in speed
seems trivial to me, although I haven't actually measured differences in
file I/O speed (It does make the icons come up fast, though! 🙂 )
I have version 2.5 of Disk Mechanic. It probably would've gone
faster if I had done a low level format on my 80 megger, restored it with
backups and THEN used Disk Mechanic to optimize the drive. In any event, I
have saved your message for future reference.
What we need is a real good set of HD utilities! I am no crazy IBM fan
or nothing, but I have a 286 BB in my Amiga. It has a real cheap & slow 8
bit hardcard (66 ms!). Norton Utilities 5.0 will optimize the drive and
zero all free space on this 32 meg beast in 30 minutes!! Norton
5 also comes with a program called calibrate. This program will check your
HD performance, and allow you to make low level changes that will speed up
the drive. It did a low level format, and changed the interleave without
loosing ANY data! This did take 4 hours though.
At work we use 33 mhz. 386's with 80 meg 28ms HD's. Norton will optimize
these in 10 minutes!
There is NO reason why a optimizer should require very large buffers ( 1
meg + ) to be just as fast. I have a quantum 105 with a supra word sync. I
never optimized it yet. And until there is a program that can do it fast
enough, I would rather backup/reformat/restore! This is easy because I
would only have to do this to my work partition.. All the rest hardly
changes! As far as the floppy goes, I hardly ever use them.
-Troy
– via Whap!
I know very little of the IBM world of software they do seem to have a
program that can do just about anything and do it well (within the limits
of the machine, of course [chuckel].) I am amazed that products like
Quarterback Tools has taken so long to come out and that more such utility
packages are not avalible. I shudder at the thoought of optimizing my hard
drive again!
Troy,
Disk Mechanic, B.A.D., and QuarterBack "TOOLS" will all OPTIMIZE our
33meg Adaptec ST-506 Hard Drive in 20 minutes; our ST-277n in 45 minutes;
and each drive has two partitions and they are 80% full. Admitedly they
are SLOW Hard Drives. After the 1st of the year we will be up-grading our
system to TRUMPH-CARD PROFESSIONALS and QUANTUM 170meg Hard Drives making
it a much faster system, which will make the optimization process MUCH
FASTER TOO.
The second utilitiy you mentioned IS needed. I would like to Adjust
interleave, do a low-level format without data loss!!!
As to why the current utilities CAN utilize (settings are adjustable on
TOOLS and THE DISK MECHANIC) LARGE amounts of RAM, could it be that to
OPTIMIZE a Hard Drive the utility must READ the current contents of the
Drive, STORE the information in RAM and then WRITE it back to the Hard
Drive in REORGANIZED order. Therefore, the more RAM to STORE the
information in — the quicker the process takes.
A 28ms 80 meg Hard Drive in 10 minutes? How many partitions? How full
is the hard drive 30% — 80% ???
— Gary Lucas —
Please excuse me for butting in here. I have been attempting to follow
this thread hoping a particular question would be answered, but if it has I
did not notice. If any of you folks could provide an answer it would be
appreciated.
I had always assumed that you could "optimize" a hard drive by backing
up your files using something like Quarterback, then doing a low level
format, then doing a regular "restore" from Quarterback. I use this method
about every 6 months on my GVP controller, ST-251N1 SCSI drive for just
that purpose – "optimization".
I certainly may have misunderstood this thread, but I thought you folks
were saying that a routine (1) backup, (2) low level format, (3) restore,
DOES NOT optimize the hard drive. Could you folks "in the know" please
leave at least one message explaining what optimization benefits, if any,
are gained by the backup-format-restore routine, and what type of
improvements we could expect with a REAL optimization program. Thanks.
Bill,
I have only Low-Level formated one of my hard drives and that was two
years ago because of some read-write errors. I have NEVER tried to
LOW-LEVEL format and a RESTORE for optimization for two reasons: 1st,
LOW-LEVEVL formating takes at least several HOURS to do; 2nd, it is my
understanding (I could be wrong) that the way Amiga DOS writes a file to
disk is in itself fragmented, and therefore an OPTIMIZATION program is much
faster (45 min. compared to 4 hours) and writes to the disk in
de-fragmented fashion. Suggestion: ask Don Curtis he seems to be the
resident Guru on Hard Drives.
— Gary Lucas —
Bill,
Yes, a restore (after a format) to a hard drive will optimize the drive
to some extent, although AmigaDOS (whihc is used by the backup program to
restore the files) may not write the files in the most time-efficient
manner. It will, however, take all or most of the fragmentation from the
files.
Leslie,
If you adjust the Cache setting to use more RAM example 1024 (one
meg.) the process will take about 45 minutes.
We have 4 Amigas and 5 Hard Drives and have only had to a LOW-LEVEL
format on one of them two years ago. The above info WILL fix the problem
of it taking so long to optimize your Hard Drive. If you have Hard Drive
Read-Write Errors then a LOW-LEVEL FORMAT would be beneficial.
— Gary Lucas —
Thanks for the point in the right direction. I'll adjust the cache
next time I optimize.
Hours to defrag a 40 Mbyte drive? Hardly .. about 15 minutes or so using QB
Tools V1.2a. Cheers, Paul (WA1OMM)
Paul, YES, it took me 2.75 hours to DE-FRAG my 50 Meg Hard Drive using
"TOOLS" v1.00. Yesterday, I got my upgrade to "TOOLS" V1.2a and last night
it took 45 minutes! A big difference.
— Gary Lucas —
There is another thread here, called Hard Disk Disaster, that describes the
problems that others have had with QB Tools.
V1.0 was a disaster. V1.2a corrects all known bugs. I have it up and
running now.
Cheers, Paul (WA1OMM)
Note if your useing the old A2090 board. You my still have problems with
V1.2a. If it weren't for the two st506 drives I have. I would have blown
this board to mars.
John.
GVP Impact Hardcard here …
Cheers, Paul (WA1OMM)
Apparently version 1.2 corrects most of the problems, or at least that
what was said by someone else here.
— Ethan