
BEER and PARTIES sound familiar?
      Welcome to fiesta.

+----------------- fiesta ----------------------+
|      Version 1.0.0 - initial release.         |
+-----------------------------------------------+

1. What is fiesta?
2. What is the purpose of fiesta?
3. What is Host Protected Area?
4. Is it safe to use fiesta?
5. Future developments?
6. Bug reports

Ad 1. fiesta is a tool I created after my Thinkpad T41's hard drive
      developed a number of bad sectors and started to show the signs of agony.
      I got inspired after trying out a GPL tool "fwdir" by newhren (colimit.gmail.com).
      Thanks!

Ad 2. The purpose of fiesta is to let you analyse the structure of the Host Protected
      Area of your hard disk, allowing for a backup to be made. This tool is intended as
      a backup tool of your precious HPA. It should not be used for cloning the HPA
      onto other machines - it may not work anyway, since most machines feature highly
      customised installations.

Ad 3. HPA is usually found in machines featuring Phoenix BIOS technology, usually laptops.
      The purpose is primarily to eliminate the need for recovery and installation CDs
      in case of a disaster - all these reside safely on a hard disk, hidden from OS by the BIOS.
      It all works well as long as your hard disk is healthy... If it breaks, then sorry,
      no more Phoenix from the ashes... Good old-fashioned backup is the only solution.

Ad 4. Current release opens files or devices only in read-only mode, so it is reasonably
      safe. However, I DO NOT give you ANY GUARANTEE that this program will not put you in
      position to corrupt your HPA if tinkered with - especially if mounting HPA partition(s)
      in read-write mode using the information provided by fiesta. As a rule of thumb,
      ALWAYS make a FULL BACKUP before tinkering with the contents of HPA.

      Things to note:

      Current release is limited to backup/restore operations
      carried out on the SAME disk or on destination disk of IDENTICAL capacity as source disk. 

      RESTORING TO A DISK OF A DIFFERENT CAPACITY WILL RESULT IN UNUSABLE HPA
      AND POSSIBLY SOME DATA LOSS DUE TO OVERWRITE OF EXISTING DATA
      IN CASE OF LARGER DESTINATION DISK.

      This issue will be addressed in future release of fiesta.
      You have been warned.
      MAKE FULL BACKUP OF YOUR DATA BEFORE TINKERING WITH HPA
      
Ad 5. I would like to have a full read-write support for disk-to-disk copy of HPA, or cloning
      if you like. It is not so straight-forward as it seems. BEER and PARTIES record of the 
      HPA needs to be fixed after cloning to disks of geometry different than source disk.
      Although I do not need that feature now, having bought identical replacement hard drive,
      I may need it some time in future. If you would like to have it sooner, help with
      development!

Ad 6. If you think you found a bug, collect as much output as possible and submit
      it through the bug tracking system on sourceforge.net.


Wishes of success!

krzakan[at]users.sourceforge.net

