this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
143 points (95.5% liked)
retrocomputing
4126 readers
21 users here now
Discussions on vintage and retrocomputing
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
And as I recall, Norton had all the tools long before MS-DOS included them by default. It was sort of a dick move by Microsoft, the sort of thing they're famous for now.
DOS has always? had chkdsk, but ndd had a knack for being able to recover data from minor corruptions way better than chkdsk did. Scandisk (dos 6 version of chkdsk) was just a prettier face, ndd was still better.
Between ndd, Spinrite, and I can’t remember the name of the undelete tools, I saved a lot of homework assignments.
chkdsk in dos never had the ability to scan the disk surface for defects, ndd did that, and then magically scandisk showed up and looked awfully similar to ndd.
But I agree, some really great tools. And sysinfo was our de facto "how fast is this thing?" for years.
Did anyone figure out if scandisk was actually licensed from someone else? I know that lots of the other MS utils were - defrag, undelete etc