Ranish Partition Manager

This is a fork of Ranish Partition Manager 2.37.11 developed until 1998 by Mikhail Ranish. Version 2.37.11 was the last version of the software with source code distributed under public domain.

The public domain statement for the source code of RANISH is given in the original README.TXT file. The README.TXT also states that the binaries are freeware. Because they are not public domain I did not include the binaries in the repository. I gave the original version git tag v2.37.11-original.

I plan to make some small modifications to the source code and have put it under Creative Commons CC-0 1.0 license.

The the source in the trunk branch was converted to Watcom C and Netwide Assember. The original version was targeted at Turbo C / Turbo Assembler.

Large disk support

The compact and advanced boot managers are not yet adapted to use LBA.

In contrast to version 2.37.99 the trunk version of Ranish contains experimental support for LBA and disk sizes up to 2 TiB if the BIOS provides extended INT13 functions. This feature is enabled by default. If you encounter issues please file a bug report. To disable large disk support and revert to standard INT13 BIOS functions run the partition manager with -x as a command line argument.

Currently Ranish uses a standardized virtual CHS geometry if the geometry the BIOS provides is obviously wrong. It is obviously wrong if the head count is less than or equal to 16 while the disk is larger 504 MB.

The virtual CHS geometry used is:

         Size             Sect Heads
           X <=  504 MiB   63  16 
 504 MiB < X <= 1008 MiB   63  32
1008 MiB < X <= 2016 MiB   63  64
2016 MiB < X <= 4032 MiB   63  128
4032 MiB < X               63  255

You may force a disk geometry by giving it explicitly at command line by parameter -g <cyls>,<heads>,<sects>. Set the cylinder count to 0 to let Ranish calculate the total cylinders based on the number of heads and sectors given. For example, -g 0,254,63 forces Ranish to use 254 heads and 63 sectors per track while calculating the cylinder count.

The maximum cylinder count which can be stored to MBR is 1024, resultung in 8064MiB addressable disk space. For partitions exceeding that limit the CHS values can not be properly stored to MBR. In such a case, Ranish stores a special CHS value indicating this condition.

At runtime, to do size calculations, Ranish can handle cylinder values greater than 1024 based on the virtual disk geometry given above and holds the LBA and CHS numbers in sync.

Compatibility with other tools

Many tools, when editing partitions beyond the 8064MiB limit, do not care to write sensible CHS entries to the MBR. In these cases Ranish warns about inconsistencies. You may ignore these inconsistencies if you did not encounter any problems before. Ranish fixes these inconsistencies when editing partitions.

Minimum System Requirements

These are the minimum requirements for the trunk version of Ranish. It may or may not run on less capable hardware.

• IBM-AT compatible PC
• minimum 512K RAM
• IDE compatible controller supporting INT 13h BIOS functions 00h-0Ah
• MS-DOS 3.3 compatible operating system
• Color- or monochrome graphics adapter

Installation

RANISH comes as a ZIP archive. You may extract it into a directory of your choice.

Making a rescue floppy disk

Before using the software it is HIGHLY recommended to create a bootable rescue disk and copy RANISH along with partition layout information onto it.

You may proceed as follows to perform these steps at the DOS / Win9x command prompt.

Format the floppy disk in drive A: and install system files:

format a: /u /s /V:PART_MANAGER

Navigate to the installation directory of RANISH and copy the program along with its help file onto the floppy:

copy part.exe a:\
copy part.htm a:\

Save the partition information of your disks. If you have only one disk only the first line is needed:

part -d 1 -s a:\disk1.mbr
part -d 2 -s a:\disk2.mbr
part -d 3 -s a:\disk3.mbr
part -d 4 -s a:\disk4.mbr

Alternatively, the last step may be performed in interactive mode. Start part.exe without command line arguments and press S to save the partition data onto your floppy disk. Make sure the correct hard disk is selected!

After saving the partition layout make sure you can boot from the created floppy disk.

Partition layout recovery

In case you messed up your partition layout you can restore it from the saved data on the rescue disk.

If you installed the Advanced Boot Manager after making the backup you have to first uninstall it in interactive mode. Press U (uninstall) followed by F2 (save).

To restore the partition data via the command line interface use the following command (adjust disk number and file accordingly):

part -d 1 -l a:\disk1.mbr

You may also restore the partition layout in interactive mode. Press L to load the data, enter the file name and press F2 to save the changes to disk.

Building

While the source may compile with other tools, the Makefile is currently targeted at the following tool chain:

• Open Watcom 1.9
• Netwide Assembler 2.15

To build part.exe, simply invoke wmake in the root directory of the repository if you downloaded the source repository. If you downloaded the binary release you first have to unpack the sources.zip file.

NASM is expected to be found via PATH. If that is not the case you have to adjust the makefile.

To build a ZIP archive of the binaries and source run wmake ranish.zip. Info-ZIP is used, so it should be in the PATH.