Find Copyright Notices on Hard Disks-Free Program

Find Copyright Notices on Hard Disks--Free Programs

by Greg Moler
allthatcounts.com

Summary: Here is a free DOS program to search hard disks for copyright notices, and to make a text file of the notices.

The zip file includes crfind.com, a program that find copyright notices on hard disk; and also sectview.com, which expands information around the copyright notices. Version 1.0 released 8/22/2006.

Download crfind10.zip (27k)

Screen Shots: choosing disk to scan selecting a partition to scan scanning in progress floppy disk file options scanning to determine the number of floppies needed

Sample Reports:

Here is the start of a sample report.

Here is a view of sector 16420808 (listed in the above report) created by sectview.com.

Features:

Supports both LBA and CHS disk addressing modes.
Supports up to 4 hard drives.
Supports hard drives up to 500 gigs (full access depends on BIOS).
You can scan disk partitions or free spaces.
Crfind.com creates a text file with control and non-printable characters removed (so it won't screw up a printer); each line of the file is formatted to 78 characters wide, including carriage return-line feed codes.
Sectview.com zooms in on a sector of interest listed in the crfind text file, creating a text report containing the sector of interest, as well as the sectors coming immediately before and after.

Requirements:

DOS (tested with MS-DOS 5.0 and MS-DOS 7.1)
A 386 or later processor.

How long does it take?

Crfind.com was written in assembly, so speed-wise it is completely I/O-bound. The speed depends on the size of the partition scanned and the speed of the disk subsystem. The number of notices found has some effect: when "hits" are found the copyright file must be updated. The following table shows results of scanning the same Linux partition loaded on 3 different hard disks, and also, the time to scan 110 gigs on a fast drive (times in hour:min:sec):

Seagate ST3120026A 120 gig Ultra DMA5
Maxtor 51024u2 10 gig Ultra DMA2
WD AC22100H 2.1 gig PIO Mode 4
Seagate ST3120026A 120 gig Ultra DMA5 1.9 gig Linux partition
1.9 gig Linux partition
1.9 gig Linux partition
110 gig free space 0:02.24
0:10:04
0:16:20
2:08:00

Limitations:

Crfind.com can only find strings, not characters generated one-by-one from software. For example, it should find the $message string:
- print $message
- $message: "Copyright 2006 Joe Foobar"
but probably won't find:
- print 'C'
- print 'o'
- print 'p' , etc.
It also cannot find encrypted strings.

If you store the copyright file on the same partition you are scanning and then "delete" the file and scan again, the file size may about double because the original data are still on the hard disk. Between such scans, you can use a utility to zero-out unused sectors--such as Norton's Wipeinfo (not included in download). Or you can use one of two files included in the download file: byebye.com writes zeros to all data in a file and then deletes the file; notfile.com performs a logical NOT on all data in a file, rendering a text file gibberish. (Using notfile.com on the same file again returns it to its original state).