Good or Bad??

[Arnold]

Is E-Z Bios good or disruptive? It was installed in error, should I just leave it alone or attempt to remove.

Arnold

[socalgal]

If your system Bios can handle it, and you're using at least Win95b, I would get rid of it.

From Western Digital manual:

"EZ-Bios is code that installs on the boot sector of your hdd if your Bios doesn't support the full capacity of your hdd - it allows your sys to overcome 528mg, 2.1G and 8.4G Bios barriers. It automatically partitions and formats your hdd."

Seems WD has renamed their latest incarnation of EZ-Bios to Data Lifeguard Tools.

Myself, I didn't care for it. It seemed to be one those "utilities" that created more headaches than solving.

Updating your mobo/bios would avoid issues that normally are a result of the hard disk having a number of cylinders larger than the maximum the BIOS supports.

Win95b (Windows 95 OEM SR2)and later support FAT32 and will overcome these limitations without the need for EZ-Bios and are a more "natural" way to go.

There are also disk partitioning utilities, such as Partition Magic, that are popular.

If you're using Win95, you may want to read about this partitioning flaw http://www.sysopt.com/win95bug.html

A good article on this subject can be found at PC Guide http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/bios/size.htm

I'm no expert this so feel free to correct me if I went awry somewhere /forum/wink.gif

[Ed_S]

Biggest problem I've seen with HD installation utils is that most require you to set the bios parameters to something other than the drive's native settings. For instance, some say to "set bios to drive type 1" no matter what "type 1" is. If, later, the drive is moved to different machine or bios change is made, you better remember that setting because auto-detect may find the drive - but the data will be inaccessable except using the util's settings!


Have an 850mb WD that was originally setup using "Ontrack" software. Later moved to newer MB which auto detected correctly, forgot about ontrack's settings & let it attempt boot. Not only did it not work, it scrambled data so badly that it couldn't be recovered after resetting to ontrack's specs!
Drive's never worked right since...
Not the only bad experience with these, just the worst!

Hopefully they've improved these utils since then, but I'll never try one again!