I recovered another program I wrote in 1995: ELPDS, or Enhanced Logical & Physical Drive Status. Run ELPDS C: and it reports physical disk geometry, partition entries, FAT boot-sector details, and free space. It doesn’t change anything on the disk. My help says it was for checking whether a partition existed and was formatted. I think I was just trying to learn about the underlying partition mechanics.
I didn’t write all of it. The help credits “Mr. Schaeffer” for a “huge part of FIPS code.” That was Arno Schaefer, whose name I misspelled. FIPS could split a FAT partition without deleting its files, often to make room for Linux. Its original project page and Berkeley project page are archived. Comparing my code with the archived FIPS source found nearly identical boot-sector parsing, disk geometry routines, and even comments. I had turned its disk-reading machinery into a standalone status tool.
GitHub Copilot CLI and I made a separate DOS port using Open Watcom, leaving the original source and executable unchanged. It runs in DOSBox-X against a disposable FAT16 disk image: 16 heads, 63 sectors per track, 65 cylinders, and about 32 MiB. We fixed decoding and error handling, but this is still a tool for old DOS disks, not modern ones.
The source, port, and build instructions are on GitHub. FIPS was GPL version 2 or later, so ELPDS is too. Thirty-one years later, I finally got the author’s name and the license right.