possible project

Hello People,

I was just wondering if you could give me any advice on this dissertation project. The project is only an idea, and I would like your honest opinions whether or not it would merit being a worthy project. If you could also perhaps think of any additional functionality which could be included into the application that would be appreciated also.

The project its self is basically a recovery application which allows you to view, edit and delete files and/or folders from different partitions on a hard drive, or maybe hard drives. It would support fat16, fat32, ntfs. The application would hopefully represent files and data in an environment similar to explorer. The program will be bootable from dos, and would have to run by enabling the boot from cd option in the bios, or by another means. The main feature of the program would perhaps to be able to backup certain partitions onto cds, and allow automatic spanning etc. I dont know if there is an application like this in existence, might be norton ghost (opinions please). Any how, any input would be greatly appreciated. Oh, it will be written within a c/c++/asm compliant compiler. Possibly visual studio or borland, maybe another yet.
Thanks.

A couple things:
Visual Studio is not standards compliant. It's great and I love it, but it's not standards compliant.

You also won't be able to make anything that runs from DOS with Visual Studio (unless there's a way I don't know). Console apps are really windows apps that LOOK like dos apps.

Oh, and why is it going to run from DOS? Modern machines don't have dos anymore...

Have you considered how you're going to do the graphics?

The reason being it should be able to boot up from dos was so it could act as a recovery program, to allow a user to retrieve their data. Say you have an ntfs partition containing winxp or server 2003 which crashes for some reason and becomes disabled. After which you reboot, and you dont have another os installed capable of viewing ntfs drives; it's quite hard to retrieve any valuable data from that ntfs drive. Thats where the program would come in. I would hope it has a few more uses as well. If anybody has got some ideas. The graphics, and being able to load folders and files from different file systems would of hopefully been the challenging part.

Hi there subdene,

Some time ago I had the exact problem you're describing. After much searching I eventually did find a program - I think - it was a while ago my memory is rusty.

Anyway, it's called NTFS DOS:

http://www.ntfs.com/products.htm

incidentally, after just googling that name, quite a few hits came up with software for this, maybe you can steal some of their features. :)

HybridM,

thanks for the reply. I've used that program before, and its pretty good. Not the best gui, but it does the job. I was hoping for a bit more feedback than this, but never mind.

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You also won't be able to make anything that runs from DOS with Visual Studio...

Oh, and why is it going to run from DOS? Modern machines don't have dos anymore...

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Right! And, you can't include DOS with your distribution unless you get a license from (and pay a royalty to) Microsoft. (Assuming you can even get a DOS license anymore.)

My system is outdated (W98)... But, can't you create a boot disk that boots to a command line... that looks like DOS?

There are two approaches that recovery / diagnosis programs use. Most often they require the user to create a boot disk with the user's (licensed) OS. Others include their own custom OS.

I suppose you could use Linux, FreeDOS, or Minux.

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Visual Studio is not standards compliant

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I just read an article in Dr. Dobbs Journal comparing compilers. They were not specifically testing compliance (various performance measurements, etc), but they didn't have any "did not compile" issues with MSVC++. (A few other compilers did fail on some of the applications.)

Most, if not all, compilers are going to have some compliance issues, but I wouldn't worry about this in advance. If you write to the standard, MSCV++ will usually compile correctly. If there is something that your compiler won't do correctly, there is usuallly another (standard) way to accomplish the same thing.

Of course there are LOTS of EXTRA non-standard functions / features included with MSVC++, but you don't have to use them.

subdene, It sounds like a good idea to me. Hopefully your Faculty Advisor will like it!

Thanks DougDbug that was the sort of feedback i was looking for. I'm still not sure whether or not this program is feasible. I've got about 8 months in which to complete it.