DDT - DEEP DISK TESTER by Richard Karsmakers
When I recently visited the CCV (that, my friends, it the
Computer Club Veldhoven, one of the cosiest computer clubs in
Southern Netherlands) someone (his name slipped my mind, sorry)
gave me the idea to write a program that can test every data-bit
of a disk - also when the disk was already written on. He came up
with the above name as well (through lack of sheer creativity, I
would never have been able to think of something quite like it -
especially when writing'n'programming on a 40 degrees Celcius
attic).
The program just asks you to insert the disk to be tested, then
checks the bootsector (to get number of sides, tracks and sectors
per track) and starts testing every single bit it can normally
read. The Deep Disk Tester cannot test protected disks (e.g. with
checksum errors or something of the kind deliberately brought
upon it) - these erroneous tracks will simply be ignored in the
test.
How does it work?
The actual test routine is actually made up like this:
1 - Read a sector
2 - Xor all bytes with 255 (every bit is inverted)
3 - Write the sector back
4 - Read it again and compare it with the sector as it should be
5 - If everything is OK, then the whole things should be Xor-ed
again and written back
This way, every single bit of the disk is tested.
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The text of the articles is identical to the originals like they appeared
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