Hate to burst your bubble guy but I can produce a 128 byte program that
¨will make any HPFS partition not only unreadable but also unrecoverable.
¨All one need do is punch a hole into the disk, that hole is nothing more
¨than 1 cluster having it's format removed. One bad sector in the file
¨system brings HPFS to its knees and that is quite simple to produce in
very ¨little code.  As for the lack of utilities, stability of the file
system is ¨the furthest thing from the true cause there. The sad fact is,
the amount ¨of factual information available to utility makers is woefully
lacking. The ¨few utilities that do exist, are unreliable. When they do
work, which is ¨seldom, they generally cause more problems or, are so
dificult for the ¨average user as to make them useless... Hell, even IBM
couldn't help when I ¨experienced a sector dropout a year ago. CHKDSK would
not work, GammaTech ¨Utilities were unable to fix the problem and so on.
How did I fix it? Quite ¨simply actually, i used a shareware DOS based
low-level format utility to ¨first test the media then perform a low-level
format on the offending ¨sector. That done, CHKDSK /F:3 brought back enough
stability to backup the ¨majority of the disk long enough to backup. Of
course, a full format and ¨reinstall were still required but I did manage
to get most of my data back.
 Put bluntly, while HPFS doesn't suffer the same fragmentation ills that
¨plague FAT volumes, it is one heck of a lot easier to break and harder to
¨fix than any FAT partition...
 If you want more OS/2 based utilities, DON"T BUY the DOS versions!
   Robert

--- Simplex/2 BBS (v1.07.00Beta [OS/2])