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5.4: Can I put DOS 3.x on my hard disk?

Not by any publically available methods to my knowledge. DOS 3.x was
designed for only 5.25" disks, though it is possible to put up to 400K
on a DOS 3.x volume. With 254 volume types available, you could creake
up to about 98MB on a HD. DOS 3.x also does not have any builtin
support for any drives other than the 5.25" drive-- you'd have to
manually hack the OS to talk to a different drive. In any case, you're
still limited by a lot of 400K volumes, lack of subdirectories, and
having to rewrite the OS yourself.

ProDOS is much more HD friendly, in terms of being able to talk to
volumes up to 32MB in size, subdirectory support, and the like.

A somewhat workable solution is to use DOS 3.3 Launcher. It lets you
copy unprotected DOS 3.3 140K disks to your hard drive, and run DOS
3.3 under ProDOS. Such functionality does have some requirements,
though: programs must only use 48K of RAM (the upper 16K is reserved
for ProDOS, which is running at the same time), not do any copy
protection or disk hackery, and generally behave themselves. DOS 3.3
Launcher is available from the normal Apple II ftp sites:
ftp://apple2.caltech.edu/pub/apple2/utils/dos3.3.shk

5.5: Can I speed up DOS 3.3 or ProDOS?

Due to some double-buffering while reading and decoding files off
disks, DOS 3.x was not as fast as it could be. A few companies sold
modified versions of DOS 3.3 to avoid the extra copy and thus
dramatically speed up disk access; Beagle Bros's ProntoDOS and many
others were widespread. Sorry, I do not know where any copies of these
speedups can be found legally online. [And I'm not going to help
anyone break the law.] ProDOS incorporates most to all of the disk
read speedups provided by DOS 3.3 third party enhancements, so it does
not need to be patched to sped up.

5.6: What about file/disk undeletion?

File undeletion capabilities are available for DOS 3.x via various
programs (sorry, no idea if any are available legally online). ProDOS
prior to version 1.4 (or maybe 1.2) scrambled filetables on deletion,
so it is much harder to recover data if deleted under that. ProSEL and
other commercially available programs can undelete ProDOS files.

There is no disk undelete functionality available-- if a disk is fully
reformatted (all sectors/blocks overwritten), all previous data is
obliterated. If only the directory track(s) are erased, it might be
possible with a lot of work-- ProSEL 8 published by Charlie's
Appleseeds has a number of tools for dealing with ProDOS disks.

5.7: How do I view a text file?

Along with copying files/disks, this is another area not directly
supported by either DOS 3.3 or ProDOS without addon programs. Under
ProDOS, 'Sneeze' is reported to be a good file viewer:
ftp://ground.isca.uiowa.edu/apple2/apple8/Pgms/SNEEZE.SHK

5.8: What does "UNABLE TO LOAD PRODOS" mean when I boot a disk?

As noted above, ProDOS is not automatically installed on every disk
formatted under ProDOS. All that is writted to disk is a very short
boot program that looks for a system (type 'SYS') file in the root
directory called 'PRODOS'. If that file is present, it is loaded, and
ProDOS installs itself. If there is no PRODOS file found, the error
message of "UNABLE TO LOAD PRODOS" is displayed on the screen.