VEC (Volume label Edit and Copy) 1.20


Copyright 1992 by Gordon Haff and Bit Masons Consulting.
All rights reserved.



Command: VEC

Purpose: Displays, edits, and copies disk/diskette volume
labels

Syntax: VEC [/?] [/c] [/d] [/r] [drive1:] [drive2:] "New label"

Prereqs: 100% IBM Compatible PC running DOS 3.0 or higher

Archive Name: VEC120.ZIP


Limitations:

None known. The Absolute Read and Write DOS
interrupts are used as required to copy or edit volume
labels with lowercase characters. These interrupts
MAY not function properly with some hardware/software
combinations (e.g. certain networks).





(tm)
o
Association of
Shareware
o Professionals

MEMBER


VEC 1.20 2


DISCLAIMER

The author hereby disclaims all warranties relating to this
product, whether express or implied, including without limitation
any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a
particular purpose. The author cannot and will not be liable for
any special, incidental, consequential, indirect or similar
damages due to loss of data or any other reason, even if the
author or an authorized agent has been advised of the possibility
of such damages. In no event shall the liability for any damages
ever exceed the price paid for the license to use the software,
regardless of the form and/or extent of the claim. The user of
this program bears all risk as to the quality and performance of
the software.

LICENSE

VEC is distributed as free, copyrighted software. What this means
is that you can use this program for as long as you like without
cost or obligation. What you cannot do is to sell this software
or make a profit off of it (except as described below) without
the express written permission of the author.

VEC is the sole property of Gordon Haff. The program may be
freely copied and transferred to individual parties. It may be
posted on Bulletin Board systems (BBS) for electronic access as
long as NO FEE is charged for its distribution except for private
BBS operations that charge a regular user subscription fee.
Computer information services such as Compuserve (CIS), Genie,
and Byte Information Exchange (BIX) are authorized to post this
product for subscriber access. VEC may be distributed on diskette
only by 1) disk distributors/vendors who are associate members of
the Association of Shareware Professionals (ASP) or 2) users
groups which do not charge more than a nominal fee ($5) to cover
the costs of distribution. Any changes to these policies must be
made in writing by the author.

This program is produced by a member of the Association of
Shareware Professionals (ASP). ASP wants to make sure that the
shareware principle works for you. If you are unable to resolve a
shareware-related problem with an ASP member by contacting the
member directly, ASP may be able to help. The ASP Ombudsman can
help you resolve a dispute or problem with an ASP member, but
does not provide technical support for members' products. Please
write to the ASP Ombudsman at 545 Grover Road, Muskegon, MI 49442
or send a Compuserve message via easyplex to ASP Ombudsman
70007,3536.

VEC 1.20 3

TECHNICAL SUPPORT


Since this program is a freebie, unlike the shareware programs
for which I request a registration fee, I'm not going to make any
guarantees here with respect to bug fixes or other technical
support. Having said that, I do like my programs to be as
bug-free as possible, so feel free to report any problems which
you run across.


Contact via:

Channel 1 BBS (617) 354-8873
Compuserve User ID# 72561,2637 (See Note 1)
InterNet [email protected]

U.S. Mail 3205 Windsor Ridge Dr.
Westboro MA 01581
Telephone (508) 898-3321 (after 6pm
Eastern time)

The above are roughly in order of preference (i.e. how quickly
I'm likely to see your message and be able to respond). I check
Channel One almost daily and the other electronic services at
least weekly in most cases. In addition, I monitor the Ilink
and the RIME Shareware relays through Channel One.

Note 1:
When contacting me via Compuserve, please use the Easyplex mail
system since I do not regularly monitor any of the IBM SIG
message bases.

VEC 1.20 4

1.0 Why VEC?

VEC serves a couple of major functions in life.

The first is to allow you to display or edit the volume label on a
hard disk or diskette. There are a variety of other programs which
do this -- most notably the VL (Volume Label) program which was
included with the Norton Utilities 4.5 and earlier (but not with
5.0 and later). VEC is 1) free and 2) works a bit better than most
of the public domain or freeware programs which I've seen.

The second function which VEC serves is to allow you to automatically
copy the volume label from one drive to another. If, for example,
you are copying a series of 1.2MB diskettes to 1.44MB diskettes, you
can use VEC to make sure that volume labels are copied as well as
files. In this circumstance, you can't use DISKCOPY since the media
aren't the same size. What you CAN do is to setup a batch file with
commands such as the following:

XCOPY A:\ B:\ /s Copies all files and directories from A: to B:
VEC /c A: B: Copies the volume label from A: to B:

Most of the time the volume label won't matter, but some commercial
installation programs do make use of the label and, as a result,
backup copies made without labels may not install properly.

With version 1.10 and later, the limitation in version 1.00 regarding
lower-case volume labels no longer exists. Version 1.20
then corrected the fact that the absolute read/write functions used
in 1.10 to handle lower-case labels only worked on <32MB partitions.
If you're interested in the technical aspects of this change, they
are discussed in Section 3.0.


VEC 1.20 5


2.0 How Does It Work?

This section shows some of the possible command lines for accessing
various functions within VEC.

DISPLAY A LABEL:

VEC /d [drive1:]

e.g. VEC /d c:
VEC /d

Display a label on the specified drive. If no drive is
specified, the current DOS drive is used.

EDIT A LABEL:

VEC [drive1:] ["New label"]

e.g. VEC d:
VEC
VEC c: "Volume 2"

Edit the label on the specified drive. If no drive is
specified, the current DOS drive is used. If no label is
specified on the command line, you will be able to interactively
enter a new label; otherwise the specified label will be used.
Labels entered on the command line must conform to the 11
character DOS Volume label limit.

When editing a drive label, you may abort at any time by
pressing the key. If you press without entering
any characters, you will also abort the current entry. The
key may be used to delete characters to the left of
the cursor.

REMOVE A LABEL:

VEC /r [drive1:]

e.g. VEC /r e:
VEC /r

Remove the label on the specified drive. If no drive is
specified, the current DOS drive is used.

COPY A LABEL:

VEC /c drive1: drive2:

e.g. VEC /c c: d:

Copy the volume label on drive c: to drive d:, overwriting the
label on drive d: if one already exists.

VEC 1.20 6

3.0 Technical and Acknowledgments.

VEC was written using Borland's Turbo Assembler and Turbo
Debugger, American Cybernetic's Multi-Edit, and Base Two
Development's Spontaneous Assembly assembler library.

VEC was developed on a homebrew 386 (named Dejah Thoris) based on
an AMI 20MHz full-size motherboard with a Micropolis 160MB ESDI
disk and Ultrastore 12(F) ESDI controller. It is a dual monitor
system with an Orchid Prodesigner 512KB VGA board and an IBM MDA
board. The system runs DOS 5, QEMM, and Windows 3.1.

As noted earlier in this documentation, VEC 1.00 would convert
all entered or copied labels to uppercase characters. The use
of standard DOS file creation services caused this to happen as
a matter of course -- all DOS filenames consist of uppercase
characters and the Volume label is a special type of filename.

VEC 1.10 and later operate the same way as 1.00 in this regard,
but add an extra step. Once the new volume label is
created, VEC now checks to see if what ended up on the disk is
what you entered for the new label name. If it's NOT, then VEC
will patch the disk entry using Absolute Disk Read and Write
interrupts. This method is perhaps not the most efficient
possible, but it has the (I think) virtue of only using the
Absolute Read/Write interrupts when there is no choice. Since
these interrupts may not work properly across as wide a range of
conditions as the DOS services, I wanted to minimize their use.
VEC 1.10 was limited to <32MB partitions. This limitation was
removed in 1.20 -- the problem was that two very different
parameter sets are used for the absolute read/write functions
depending upon whether the partition size is >32MB or not. 1.10
supported only the small partition version of these calls.

A digression on how volume labels are stored -- knowledge
attained through tedious debugging:

Volume names are a special type of filename, e.g. FILENAME.EXT.
They are always in the root directory of the drive and are
special in that the 4th file attribute bit, the volume label
bit, (08h) is set. However, we don't normally display the
volume label like a normal filename (i.e. we usually think of
the volume label as an 11 chracter name) and here's where things
get tricky and ugly.

1) IF the name is less than 8 characters, we just display it.

2) IF the name is 12 characters (counting the period), we just
ignore the period.

3) IF we're in between these two (actually number 2 is a subset
of this), a period in position 9 is ignored while a space is
substituted for a period in position 8. Periods in other
positions are treated just like any other character. (e.g.
..... ... . is a perfectly valid label.)

VEC 1.20 7


4.0 Other Programs from Gordon Haff and Bit Masons Consulting:


Directory Freedom (DF):

Offers users a fast, compact alternative to DOS Shells which
provides 1) selective file and directory operations; 2) a
scrollable environment for examining files and directories; 3)
user-defined keys which can operate upon highlighted files
(e.g. by defining an editor). All this in a program which
takes less than 25KB since it is written in assembler! Easily
customized through an external configuration program. A "look-
and-feel" similar to PC Mag's DR, but does much more. Now with
SmartViewers and many more exciting new features.
Shareware: $20 Registration
Latest version: 4.50 (DF450.ZIP)

the last word:

'the last word' is a quotations trivia game in which 1 to 4
players compete against each other and their own high scores in
identifying the source of quotations and completing partial
quotes. Most answers are entered free-form and are matched
against a set of acceptable responses with a sophisticated
pattern-recognition algorithm. 'the last word' runs in text
mode -- including on mono displays -- and offers a high level
of user configurability.
Shareware: $15 Registration
Latest version: 1.00 (LWORD100.ZIP)

CONVERT:

Unit conversion calculator for Windows 3.0. Comes with a data
file containing a large number of common (and not so common)
conversions in categories such as length, speed, pressure,
volume, and time. The data file is a plain ASCII text file so
the user may add or delete units to best fit his individual
needs.
Free, copyrighted software
Latest version: 1.0 (CNVRT100.ZIP)


VEC 1.20 8


X-Ray Viewers:

The X-Ray Viewers provide a scrollable environment for
examining the contents of various types of archive files and
allows the user to view those contents by piping them to LIST.
In other words, you can read a text file contained within, for
example, a .ZIP file without extracting the archive. In
combination with the SmartViewer functions in DF, the X-Ray
viewers make the examination of .ZIP, .ARJ, .LZH, and .ZOO
files almost automatic (just highlight a file and press
). "Freeware" but requires the appropriate archive
program and LIST to function.
Free, copyrighted software
Latest revision: 1.02 (XRAY102.ZIP)


MakeTest:

Command-line utility to create test files. Lets you create
any number of test files with user-specified names and sizes.
Automatically can add characters to avoid duplicate names.
This is an easy way to create something like 100 zero-length
files. Handy for users or programmers who want to test a
program's capabilities.
Free, copyrighted software with QB source
Latest version: 1.0 (MKTST100.ZIP)


NameDate:

Renames a file to the current date. In other words, if the
current date were 10-06-90, the file 'FILENAME.QWK' could be
renamed to 901006.QWK. The letters or numbers can be
appended as required to largely eliminate duplications.
Version 2.0 allows the user to define formats and specify many
other parameters. This is a handy program for archiving
message packets from bulletin boards, for example.
Free, copyrighted software
Latest version: 2.0 (NAMD200.ZIP)

These programs and others (Multi-Edit macros for use with Qmail
Deluxe, for example) are available on many fine bulletin boards.
The latest releases are always available on Channel One. If you
just have to get a copy of one or more of these programs and
can't find one, however, I can send them out for a nominal media
and postage charge ($5 for a single diskette).

VEC 1.20 9

5.0 History:

Rev. 1.00 Initial Release.

Rev. 1.10 Lower-case labels can now be edited and copied
[/r] Remove label switch added
New label can be specified on command-line
Improved display when no label on drive

Rev. 1.20 Upper/lower case volume labels now handled properly
on >32MB partitions (DOS 4 and greater). This
method will probably not work on >32MB partitions
using third-party products on int 25h/26h (absolute read/write) syntax introduced
for larger partitions in DOS 4 is used.