Disk Utilities is a collection of twelve programs, some of which will be useful to any DragonDOS owner. All of the utilities are entered from a main menu which is called up by typing RUN "M". The menu is displayed in a very readable 40 column display and selection is made by moving the cursor line to the required utility and pressing Enter. Most utilities then require you to press Enter again, although for no apparent reason.

The first utility is to send a copy of the directory to the printer. I have commented before that this can be done from Basic with POKE 111,254:DIR, so the disk space could have been used for a more useful utility here.

A more useful option is 'Disk View'. This allows any sector of the disk to be viewed, using the cursor keys to skip forward or backward a track or sector at a time. The sector is displayed as ASCII characters at the top of the screen. My only complaint here is that there is no option to dump the sector as HEX codes.

Four separate utilities provided allow programs to be copied from disk to disk, tape to tape, tape to disk and disk to tape. This all sounded very promising until I found that the only files which could be copied of any of the utilities are binary files which load above address 7000! The program will not copy Basic or data files. Again, these are potentially very useful utilities, spoilt by inflexibility.

Perhaps the most useful program on the disk is the one which recovers accidentally KILLed files, providing nothing has since been written to the disk. This utility allows any file type to be recovered and gives you the option of Protecting the recovered file.

Another well implemented utility is the Sector Editor. Any sector may be loaded in and edited using the cursor keys. Bytes can be changed either by entering the ASCII character or the ASCII code. The ASCII code of the byte under the cursor is also printed which is essential for identifying non-printing characters. The most common use for the sector editor would probably be to change filenames on the directory track directly (especially useful for null filenames), or, used in conjunction with the 'Disk View' option, to locate the required sector of a program and to change it directly, although this can be potentially fatal.

An option which looked very useful was Disk Menu Creator; this purports to create a menu program on any disk enabling you to load any of the last twelve programs on the disk by a single keypress. Unfortunately, all my attempts to use this utility constantly resulted in the program crashing with ?PT error - so much for the 'user-friendly prompts'.

The final couple of utilities included allow a complete disk to be saved and loaded from tape. One disk takes about 20 minutes to transfer to or from tape, and as cassettes are cheaper than disks this is an economical way of backing up disks for safety - providing you can stand the wait!

Apart from the few annoying features of this disk, such as not being able to return to the main menu from any of the utilities and the fact that error messages are not explained - "DISK ERROR" is all you get - this is a genuinely useful set of utilities for disk drive owners. It is a shame that there is no option to use two or more drives, which would save a lot of disk swapping.

Unlike Domino's Disk Doctor program, reviewed in the September issue of Dragon User, there is no utility to automatically recover damaged programs - you'll have to do this manually using the Sector editing option. However, at £10 this offering is considerably less expensive than Domino's.

Brian Cadge