A Review of the
PTS (PhysTechSoft) Disk Editor
(or PTSDE)

The Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology
( http://www.phystechsoft.com/ )
Note: The PTS - Disk Editor discussed here is the free version (v.1.04; 1998);
not their latest commercial program which has a few additional features.

When you run PTSDE, you'll see a window similar to this one in a DOS-Window
( I recommend using a FULL-screen DOS-Window for PTSDE.
Click here: For info on "How to use a DOS-Window in Windows" ) :

You can see that I have two hard drives on my system (a 3GB and a 6GB).

PTSDE will use the Windows mouse driver ( the pointer appears as a small block instead of an arrow in both a DOS-Window and full-screen DOS) so you can control functions with either the keyboard or the mouse. When you run PTSDE in DOS-ONLY mode; without any Windows OS running, the display will look much nicer (and you'll see a true arrow-head pointer for the mouse) compared to the screen captures here from a DOS-Window.¹
(See below for a list of the Keyboard Commands available from the only online Help screen; press the <F1> key or click on 'Help' after  you open a sector display window in PTSDE.)
__________________
¹ I added some DOS-only mode screen captures to this page; look for them here.

If you select the "Partitions" item (instead of Physical devices), you'll be presented with a list of partitions in the gray box; the selected item is shown in white with arrowheads on either side of it. In this case, we've selected the Partition Table (*** Table) contained in the Master Boot Record (MBR) of my first hard drive. The item below that is the only

partition on my first drive; well, the only one you can see while running Windows 95/98 that is! The partition-type (a FAT-32) and size (2.9 GB) are also shown. If we selected the next "*** Table" item (*** Table), PTSDE would show us the main Partition Table for my Second HD. This is followed by an unused partition (Free Space) of 7.8 MB. To see the other partitions on my second drive, we'd have to scroll down through all the rest of the items in the box. Let's take a quick look at a few more of them:

I have four Logical drives on my second HD, but none of them can be set 'Active' (bootable) becuase the whole drive was created as an "Extended (DOS) Partition." The selected item (*** Table) in the pic above is the first of four Extended  partition tables. Each table precedes one of the four logical drives with which it is associated, and all of these tables are chained together from the drive's main Partition Table in the MBR. But, I don't really want to get into how that works here... So, let's go back to selecting the very first sector (or MBR) of Drive 1 to see what the window looks like in PTSDE:

If you highlight one of the four partition entries and press the < SPACE > BAR, PTSDE will pop-up a small window in which you can view the ID byte for that partition entry or even change its partition-type. You can see below that the ID byte for a standard Windows 32-bit FAT entry is 0B hex:

In order to see the rest of the Master Boot Record (for example, all the bytes that make up MBR's code section), we need to switch to the " Hex " viewing mode as follows:

Now we can scroll through ALL of the bytes in this sector:

If we return to the " Partition " viewing mode for this sector, highlight the first entry (Win95 FAT-32) and press the < ENTER > key (or click on that entry with the mouse pointer), PTSDE will take us directly to the Boot Record for this partition (using the "Boot-sector FAT32" viewing mode) :

In order to see all the bytes that make up the 'MSWIN4.1' Boot Record, we need to switch to the " Hex " viewing mode as follows:

Now we can scroll through all of the bytes of Absolute Sector 63, drive 1 :

One of the features of PTSDE is the fact that you can re-size its windows with the mouse and open more than one window (even within DOS-Windows). Here are two PTSDE windows showing the Boot Record from drive 1 and the first Boot Record from drive 2 of my system:

PTSDE in "Real" DOS Mode

If you looked at the pics above, you'll notice right away that they look a bit better here... the scroll-bars, buttons and arrows are much nicer. This is how PTSDE appears in "Real DOS mode" or running on its own without any OS at all. You'll also be able to see any partitions that were " hidden" while

Windows was running! This includes the so-called "test cylinder" that many utility programs still allow for rather than formatting all the way to the end of a drive. And in most cases they won't show that this 'free space' even exists!  Most (if not all) of the commercially available hard drive utilities such as those used for cloning (drive imaging) and re-partitioning consider the last cylinder of a drive as 'reserved space' (apparently since MS-DOS formatted drives this way for such a long time). Surprisingly, Windows NT offers the option of formatting the whole drive. ( I found out the hard way that it's best not to do this: When I tried to clone a particular drive onto another one of exactly the same type, the cloning software refused to do so, stating that there wasn't enough free space on my completely empty drive! Why? Because it wouldn't use what it considered to be the 'sacred' test-cylinder area !!   I had to start all over from scratch re-formatting the 'master' drive under NT again, but this time without using the space on the last cylinder.) Although this area doesn't use a great deal of space by today's standards, you will find that the amount increases as the size of the drive does since it always uses a whole cylinder. Thus, the 'test cylinder' of my 3 GB drive contains almost 4 MB, whereas my 6 GB drive uses about 8 MB for this 'wasted' partition.

HELP: Keyboard Commands

                         Move Cursor
                        -------------
PageUp/Down  - Page up or down
Home/End     - Go to home or end of sector
Ctrl-Home    - Go to begin
Ctrl-End     - Go to end

                       Block operation
                       ---------------
Ctrl-B        - Mark block
Ctrl-Ins or
Ctrl-C        - Copy block to buffer
Shift-Ins or
Ctrl-V        - Paste over block
Shift         - Mark block

                            Search
                         ------------
Ctrl-F or
Ctrl-S      - Find string
Ctrl-G      - Find again
Alt-P       - Go to sector
Alt-A       - Go to begin
Ctrl-BackSp - Back through history

                         Change view
                        -------------
F2          - View as hex
F6          - View as partition table
F7          - View as boot sector FAT-16
Alt-F7      - View as boot sector FAT-32

                          Other keys
                    -----------------------
F1          - This help

Tab         - In hex view - switch between text and code,
              other - go to next edit field

Shift-Tab   - Go to previous edit field
Ctrl-Tab or
Alt-Tab     - Next window

Enter       - Go to extended partition table or boot sector
Space       - Choose partition type or change boot flag state

BackSpace   - In hex view - undo changed byte

Alt-BackSp or
Ctrl-U         - Undo
Ctrl-W         - Save sector
Esc            - Close window
Alt-X          - Exit

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