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The ChAoS Utilities - CDU 0.6.060

PLEASE NOTE THAT CDU IS STILL IN BETA-TEST. Although the CDU is now available, it is still in beta-test. We have decided to make it available because it is very useful even if all the little "funnies" haven't been ironed out. For the most part, these may very well not go away - they are not simply programming bugs but are due to API inadequacies, our ignorance of the APIs and so on. We have a very small number of beta-testers and things progress slowly so, if you think you can help improve CDU, we'd very much like to have you aboard as a CDU beta-tester - system programming "techies" are particularly sought after. If you're interested in becoming a CDU beta-tester, please contact us at the CDU email address.

In particular, CDU now displays the INT13ex API version number if something like "CDU VERBOSE PROBE" is used. We would be very interested in input from beta testers with version three APIs. For example, this machine has a version one API (the "0x01" bit):

        Drive HD0 INT13ex version 0x01 API bits 0x03

CDU is an MSdos-based, command-line, sector-level disk editor and viewing utility.

The capabilities are very similar to those of ABI2, except that CDU is not an interactive program and that it can access drives that ABI2 can't handle. ABI2 can handle drives up to the CHS/BIOS limit of eight gigabytes whereas CDU is only limited by the extended INT13 interface.

CDU is a command-line utility and we have made available the full text of CDU's help page. CDU comes with a "read me" file, FAQ, tutorial, change log and reference manual.

Large CDU screen shot

CDU operates using a concept of "streams". Each command requires one or two streams to be cited and, for the most part, commands operate the same regardless of the type of stream being used. Thus, one can copy a complete disk image to a compressed file but, since CDU is stream based, another file can be used as the source, as well. Examples of stream types are hard drives, files, GZIP archives, character values and MSdos volumes.

In addition to the documentation, CDU comes with a few heavily-commented example script files. There's one that captures a floppy's contents, one that will write an image file to a floppy and one that will sanity check a newly-formatted floppy.


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