MBR and Ontrack disk manager
d...@csr.city.ac.uk
My practical problem is now solved, but is there anyone out there who has
time to satisfy my curiosity. (Perhaps I should point out at the
beginning that I'm an amateur with this sort of stuff.)
I had a Seagate 2.1Gb H/D on an old 486 motherboard which was able to
access the disk OK once I had installed Ontrack's "Dynamic Drive Overlay"
using some some bundled software called "Ontrack Disk Manager".
When I wanted to transfer this H/D to a new (1994 AMI BIOS) motherboard I
thought I'd do it "the quick and safe way" which would avoid me having to
wade through Ontrack's Disk Manager manual. I knew that I
eventually wouldn't need disk manager or dynamic drive overlay with the
newer motherboard. I made two verified tape backups of the entire H/D,
moved the H/D to the new motherboard, and selected the Auto H/D detect
BIOS option. Then I tried to simply clean every trace of Ontrack and Disk
Manager (and all my own files in the process) from the disk using FDISK
to delete all the partitions. (Actually I repeated the whole cycle I'm
describing here about ten times, with small variations.) I created one
large primary DOS partition, formated (FORMAT /S) the whole disk, and
re-installed DOS and the tape-drive S/W from floppies. My plan was then
to simply copy back all the files from tape. Where I got stuck was that
the following two things persistently occurred, which prevented me from
using the H/D as the boot disk on the new motherboard:-
1. I just couldn't get rid of the "starting Ontrack 7.01" (or something
like this) message when I attempted to boot from the H/D on the new
machine. This was after doing what I thought ought to have completely
"cleaned" the disk. I used fdisk to remove all partitions several times,
also I tried using norton disk doctor from a floppy to "correct the MBR"
and such things. But Ontrack's software stubbornly refused to vacate my
disk.
2. The Ontrack software wouldn't run on the new machine, the machine
would just hang after the Starting Ontrack message unless I booted
directly from a floppy. I installed the DOS system files on the newly
partitioned and reformated disk (using a boot from floppy), but the
problem with the Ontrack S/W and the new machine made it impossible to
boot from the H/D. Similarly, even if I booted from the Ontrack floppy I
had created (and used with no problem) on the other machine, still the
Ontrack Disk Manager S/W on that floppy hung the machine whenever I tried
to run it. So I couldn't use Ontrack's own Disk Manager commands to
uninstall Ontrack's dynamic drive overlay from the H/D.
My eventual solution, after messing about for a few hours, was to rebuild
the machine with the old motherboard, run Disk Manager (from the same
Ontrack floppy that I hadn't been able to use with the new board) and
use Disk Manager's uninstall command to finally get rid of all evidence
of Ontrack S/W from the H/D. When I moved the H/D back to the new board,
everything was fine.
Any comments on the above would be interesting to me but I don't for
a minute hope to understand all the details about software everlays
for managing large disks : I only really have one main question that's
bugging me:-
Where was the Ontrack software hiding on my H/D? I'd understood that the
Dynamic Drive Overlay was somehow written into the code of the MBR on the
H/D. I also thought that removing all partitions and recreating a single
primary DOS partition (i.e. using options 4, 3 and 1 of the DOS FDISK
command) would recreate some kind of standard MBR code, overwriting
Ontrack's code. Why didn't this happen? What commands do you need to
completely "clean" a H/D to the state in which it left the factory - so
that no special overlay software or partitionaing information remains on
it? If I had sold that H/D to you without the Ontrack floppy, would you
have been able to clean it up and use it as an ordinary disk on a newer
machine? I've convinced myself that this cannot be done with FDISK. What
commands would you do it with?
Thanks in advance to anyone who can enlighten me.
David Wright
SQWEEKY
>Simple solution
>Make a bootable floppy - copy fdisk.com to the floppy
>Boot up off the floppy
>Run FDISK /MBR
>The hard drive light flashes for a second and voila disk overlay is gone
>Been there done that got the t-shirt
>Sqweeky
Dave
> d...@csr.city.ac.uk wrote in article <31F55A...@csr.city.ac.uk>...
>
>
> Where was the Ontrack software hiding on my H/D? I'd understood that the
> Dynamic Drive Overlay was somehow written into the code of the MBR...
>****
>
I don't know where the DDO hides either, but I had the exact same problem
you described, except the Uninstall wouldn't even run on mine. Ontrack's
tech support had me run FDISK /MBR to delete the partitions and that
worked. Does that help anyone else explain this phenom?
Wally Bass
In article <01bb78c7.be6a8ea0$2fc475cc@atty1>, Dave <de...@atlantic.net> wrote:
>> d...@csr.city.ac.uk wrote in article <31F55A...@csr.city.ac.uk>...
>> Where was the Ontrack software hiding on my H/D? I'd understood that the
>I don't know where the DDO hides either..
>Does that help anyone else explain this phenom?
Ontrack installs a MBR on the first sector of track 0, which allows
Ontrack's DDO to be booted first when you boot from the hard disk (the
DDO itself is stored in other sectors on track 0). Once the DDO is in
memory, it offsets the ENTIRE DRIVE addressing by one track. Hence, if
you then run FDISK, when FDISK TRIES to write a MBR on the first
sector of track 0, the DDO redirects that so that it is actually gets
written on the first sector of track 1. No matter what you do, if the
DDO is in memory, you cannot get at the REAL track 0 at all (at least,
not using INT 13h), hence you cannot remove Ontrack. In the meantime,
EVERYTHING else that you write on your disk is 'secretly' written in a
non-standard place (one track higher than it would normally be), hence
making 'deinstallation' of Ontrack about as difficult as it could
possibly be.
As pointed out in other articles, you can avoid having the DDO install
by booting from diskette, making sure that you do so in a way were you
are REALLY booting straight from diskette (not doing an Ontrack
'redirected' boot from diskette, where the DDO has already been booted
from hard disk). Then, FDISK can get at the REAL MBR on track 0, and
you can get Ontrack deleted.
BTW, as I have commented in the news group before, I believe that the
fact that Ontrack effectively causes a user's hard disk to be
formatted in a non-standard way which causes the kinds of problems
that Dave and dw described in the references above, coupled with
Ontrack's lack of documentation as to what they are doing to user's
data when Ontrack is installed, ought to leave them criminally liable.
There is no excuse for creating a situation where one has to move ALL
of the data on a fixed disk in order to remove a piece of software,
and there is even less excuse for not making that fact clear at the
time one starts to install Ontrack.
Wally Bass
Mark Carter
Wally Bass (wb...@netcom.com) wrote:
: There is no excuse for creating a situation where one has to move ALL
: of the data on a fixed disk in order to remove a piece of software,
If you'd peruse the software a bit closer, you can uninstall it quite
easily using the software's uninstall feature. And just so you know,
I've been running two 850 MB Maxtor drives for a year or two now using DM
with absolutely no problems.
In fact, the only way I know it's there is that the Loading DM Blue Bar pops
up when I boot the computer. In all other respects the computer operates
the same as any other. I'm using version 7.03. Are you perhaps using, or
have experience with, an ancient version?
Mark
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Robert Nichols
In article <4trvk5$h...@brain.npiec.on.ca>,
Mark Carter <mca...@freenet.npiec.on.ca> wrote:
:Wally Bass (wb...@netcom.com) wrote:
:: There is no excuse for creating a situation where one has to move ALL
:: of the data on a fixed disk in order to remove a piece of software,
:
:If you'd peruse the software a bit closer, you can uninstall it quite
:easily using the software's uninstall feature. And just so you know,
:I've been running two 850 MB Maxtor drives for a year or two now using DM
:with absolutely no problems.
There is only a limited set of conditions that allows Disk Manager to be
uninstalled without losing access to the data currently on the disk.
You must have a BIOS that is willing to access the disk using the same
translated geometry as was being used by Disk Manager. There is much
the same situation with large SCSI drives: if you switch SCSI adapters
and the new one translates large drives into a geometry different from
the one used by the old host adapter, your data is inaccessible and you
have no choice but to repartition and reformat the drive.
--
Bob Nichols rnic...@interaccess.com
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