History
Disk editors for home computers of the 1980s were often included as part of utility software packages on floppies or cartridges. The latter had the advantage of being instantly available at power-on and after resets, instead of having to be (re)loaded on the same disk drive that later would hold the floppy to be edited (the majority of home computer users possessed only one floppy disk drive at that time). Having the disk editor on cartridge also helped the user avoid editing/damaging the disk editor application disk by mistake.
All disk editors strive to be better than DEBUG contained in all DOS versions. DEBUG can load, edit, and write one or more sectors from a floppy or hard disk based on the BIOS. This permits simple disk editing tasks such as saving and restoring the master boot record and other critical sectors, or even changing the active (= boot) partition in the MBR. In an NTVDM under Windows NT DEBUG cannot access the physical drive with the MBR of the operating system and is in essence useless as disk editor for the system drive. The Resource Kit and the support tools for some Windows NT versions contain DSKPROBE as a very simple disk editor supporting the use and modification of the partition table in the MBR and related tasks.
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