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(C) Yan Seiner 1988
May not be used in any commercial product without express written permission of
the author. May be copied, and distributed freely with this doc file.
bse drive_letter
is a simple boot sector editor. It is designed to complement Norton's Advanced
Utilites, which for some unfathomable reason, does not provide one.
WARNING!!!!!
bse can trash your disks with ease. DOS takes the boot sector very seriously.
Changing things randomly can lose you all your data, as well as damage your
hardware. MAKE BACKUPS before using it on your hard disks. Learn how to use it
on floppies. Get a good book on DOS (Ray Duncan's Advanced DOS comes to mind.)
IN NO CASE WILL I BE RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU USE BSE!!!! MAKE
BACKUPS!!! KNOW WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN WHEN YOU CHANGE THE BOOT SECTOR BEFORE
YOU MAKE ANY CHANGES!!!!
Changing cluster size
Why should I do that? Because DOS is very stupid. It formats small hard disks
with large clusters. What this means is that EVERY file on a 10 Meg HD takes at
least 4K. Many of my files are small (under 1K) and changing cluster size to 1K
increased my useful storage by over 30%.
What is a cluster?
A cluster is a group of sectors. A sector is 512 bytes long. DOS stores files
in clusters. Thus, a HD with 8 sector clusters will require 4K per file, no
matter how small. Fortunately, a cluster can consist of almost any number of
sectors. It is best for a cluster to consist of powers of two multiples of
sectors. A 10 Meg HD is formatted with 8 sector clusters by default. You can
change this to 4, 2, or even 1. There are drawbacks to using a small cluster,
but if you have a lot of RAM and not enough disk space, you can gain a lot.
Using small clusters tends to leave less room for programs in RAM. This should
not be a concern unless you have only 256K RAM.
How to change cluster size
1. Cold boot DOS.
2. MAKE BACKUPS. One as a minmum, two preferrably.
3. Make a bootable floppy, with bse and format on it.
4. Run bse, specifying drive letter.
4a. Change sectors per cluster
4b. Hit F9 to calculate FAT size (should be around 40 sectors)
4c. Hit F10 to exit, writing changes to sector.
5. Cold boot DOS to read new boot sector (it is read once, at boot time.)
Disk is now unreadable.
6. Format disk.
7. Restore from backups.
Good Luck!
Yan Seiner 1988
223-C King St.
Princeton, NJ 08540