                      Expunging DOS from Disks

        Owners of quikLoader do not normally need to boot DOS 3.3 from a disk.  
Therefore, with quikLoader installed in your Apple, there is no reason to have 
DOS resident on all of your disks.  This means you can remove the bootable DOS 
image from most of your disks and gain an additional 32 sectors per disk for 
data storage.  You only need to keep DOS on a few disks for safekeeping in case 
the need arises to boot DOS from a disk.

     On the PROGRAMMERS AID disk is a utility program which will expunge the 
DOS image from disks.  (Program name is EXPUNGE).  It does not actually 
overwrite DOS, but only frees tracks 1 and 2 in the VTOC (Volume Table Of 
Contents at track $11, sector $00).  It does overwrite track $00, sector $00 
with a short program to print a reminder that DOS has been expunged if you 
attempt to boot the disk.  Since tracks 1 and 2 are free in the VTOC, DOS will 
eventually overwrite the tracks if you store enough data to the disk.

        You should be cautious of a couple of pitfalls that you might encounter 
when expunging DOS from your disks.  First, many commercial programs contain a 
modified version of DOS and won't run with the standard DOS 3.3.  Expunging the 
modified DOS from a disk like this could cause the disk to become irretrievably 
clobbered.  It is therefore recommended that you only expunge DOS from disks 
you have initialized yourself or from backups of commercial programs.  
Certainly you should never expunge DOS from disks which must be booted to bring 
up the resident application.

        The second pitfall in expunging DOS is when you attempt to expunge DOS 
from a disk that doesn't contain DOS.  When you free tracks 1 and 2 on a disk 
like this, you may well be enabling DOS to overwrite important data.  In other 
words, don't run an expunge program more than once on a disk, and don't attempt 
to expunge DOS from a disk that never had DOS on it (e.g. disks formatted by 
spreadsheet programs or word processors).  Southern California Research Group 
cannot accept responsibility of loss of data that might occur when using this 
program.

        To operate the EXPUNGE program, just BRUN the program and do what the 
screen prompts say.  This program will warn you if any sector on tracks 1 or 2 
is free or if track $00, sector $00 contains a "not bootable" message.  If this 
is the case, the DOS image is probably not present and you should probably not 
allow EXPUNGE to free tracks 1 and 2.


                                                          
