A very detailed description of Disk Administrator work items can be found in wddev.doc. Things found here are more detailed or unrelated notes. Visual/UI improvements for windisk: =================================== The columns in volumes view should be sorted when a column header is clicked, and sorted in the opposite order when the column is clicked again. There is some code in place to support this, but it doesn't work, due to a problem with the list control. When we start using Cairo/Chicago visuals, there are some tweaks to consider: (1) highlight at the top of the toolbar, (2) drop the current spin button; use the comctl32.dll spin button (which looks really bad unless next to a sunken edit field). The "properties" menu item should possibly be on the "View" menu instead of the "Tools" menu. The comctl32.dll toolbar sits at the left edge of the window, which looks bad with NT visuals (i.e., non-bevelled window edges). Either fix this or wait for new visuals. Allow a user to select a printer to print chkdsk results to. Currently, it always uses the default printer. If the default printer doesn't exist, it pops up a "no default printer; use Print Manager to choose one" message box. Display what is loaded from a saved configuration, and allow changes, etc, before committing. And only commit the saved config if the user chooses to after a confirmation. Currently, a "configuration load" loads up the saved configuration and saves it: you get what you saved, no changes allowed. Don't regenerate the listview unless it changes. Also, if only one line changes, fix that line instead of regenerating the entire view. Have an option on the "Drive letter" dialog that allows setting all drive letters on the system to their default. Essentially, it would set everything to "do not assign a drive letter" except FT sets, which don't support non-persistent drive letters. So, after all the default ones were assigned, all the FT ones would be assigned. Allow setting a drive letter to something used by a network redirected drive. This would require doing the equivalent of a "net use x: /d" before affecting the change, and would require user confirmation before doing so. More columns in volumes view. There is likely more useful information that could be placed in the view, such as which volumes have active net sessions, which volumes are shared on the network in any way, an "activity" measurement so an admin can ask the question "which disks get the most use", etc. The set of displayed columns should be configurable, and stored with the user profile. Visually distinguish formatted & unformatted (i.e., newly created) volumes more strongly than now. For example, two volumes (one formatted, one not) that both have no label look exactly alike, except one has a "file system" named "Unknown". Could we gray the text? Shade the volume boxes? Use a different font? If you try to delete the primary/boot partition on drive 0, you get a message that "Windisk can't delete this partition" (similar, anyway). DOS Fdisk says the same, but pointed out to me that it was because there was an extended partition. After I deleted the extended partition, I could delete the primary partition. Windisk should give a better error message in this case? When Disk Administrator is starting, display a "splash screen" pop-up until we are ready to go. Put CD-ROMs in volumes view. Functional improvements for windisk: ==================================== One or more standard disk property sheets should be created that display SCSI/IDE adapter info, physical drive info, possibly some performance measurements, hardware FT information, etc. There could be one property sheet per disk, with any number of pages. Or, if we only need one page per disk, we could have a sheet where each page is titled "disk N". Since we now have on-the-fly partitioning, we should ask the user immediately after creating a partition whether or not they wish to format the volume, and send them directly into that dialog if they do. The profile information should use registry calls, not *PrivateProfileString APIs. Q: when does the "Configuration information not available" message get displayed in an empty disk box? I have hard-coded FmMediaFixed in the Format call. What about removable hard drives? Windisk saves information to the registry for every disk that it's ever seen. Should we have some kind of "advanced" option that allows an admin to purge unused registry information? Other: ====== Check all BUGBUGs before shipping.