Pantion
11-28-1999, 02:23 AM
First of all this method is for all that have been unable to remove that program and is causing problems either for boot, install, HDD size and any other problem related to it.
READ ALL OF IT BEFORE DOING ANYTHING!!!
THIS IS A DANGEROUS PROCEDURE AND CAN LEAVE YOU WITH NO CHOICE BUT TO MAKE EITHER NORMAL OR LOW LEVEL FORMAT!!
Getting Rid of Dynamic Drive Overlay
by Dave Lawrence, ICTS Staff—JAARS, Waxhaw dave_lawrence@sil.org
Some people have Ontrack Disk Manager or EZ-Drive on a hard drive that’s larger than 528MB in a desktop computer that’s too old to know about LBA (Logical Block Addressing). If you get a new computer without a hard disk drive (HDD), or a new motherboard, and reuse the same HDD, how do you get rid of the Dynamic Drive Overlay (D.D. Overlay) that Ontrack or EZ put on the HDD, so you can use the LBA capability of the new motherboard BIOS?
There are two or three things to try. Because of certain variables, it is unpredictable how hard it might be to get rid of the D.D. Overlay.
The Dynamic Drive Overlay identifies itself just after the computer’s Power On Self Test (POST) when the system first starts to read the HDD for booting. A blue banner appears on the black and white text mode screen which says Disk Manager or EZ-Drive or whatever your D.D. Overlay is. It says if you want to boot a floppy to press the Space bar, or Shift+ Space, or the combination your system requires. After waiting almost too short a time for you even to get your fingers up to the keys, it proceeds to boot the HDD.
That blue banner with the special key instruction for floppy boot is the thing you want to get rid of.
Warning! The following will destroy everything on your HDD. You must do a backup and be prepared to entirely reinstall your operating system (Windows), application software, your data, everything.
1) Back up your HDD to prepare to lose everything that was on it. Be sure you have a bootable diskette of your operating system. You’ll need a boot disk of DOS 5.0 or above, or Windows 95 startup disk. Your floppy disk should contain COMMAND.COM and the hidden system files, to make it bootable, plus the following DOS files: FDISK.EXE, FORMAT.COM, DEBUG.EXE, and SYS.COM.
2) From DOS (or DOS mode of Windows 95), run Fdisk and delete all partitions on the drive.
3) Restart the computer with no diskette in the A: drive. If the blue banner is gone, skip down to #8 below.
4) Boot your startup floppy and run FDISK/MBR (to rewrite the Master Boot Record). Restart with the A: drive empty. If the blue banner is gone, skip down to #8.
5) Boot your startup floppy and then run the Disk Manager or EZ program from the floppy that either came with the drive or you created using the Seamove program (for Seagate HDD). Most versions of this program have blue menu boxes with yellow or white text (in text mode video). Wade through the menu system of the program until you find an item to Remove Disk Manager (Remove EZ), and run that. That procedure should get rid of the startup blue banner. Afterwards, restart with the A: drive empty. If the blue banner is gone, skip down to #8.
6) If you have no such floppy as in #5 above, or if none of the above works to remove the blue banner, use the following Debug script which I recently discovered. Boot from floppy and run Debug.
7) At Debug’s hyphen prompt, type all the following lines, ending each line with the Enter key:
F 200 L200 0
a 100
mov ax,301
mov bx,200
mov cx,1
mov dx,0080 (Note: use 0081 for second fixed disk)
int 13
int 3
(enter a blank line here)
G=100
q
8) The HDD should have no partitions nor Dynamic Drive Overlay on it. Use Fdisk to set up the drive partition(s), and Format to format it.
9) Reinstall the operating system and restore all software, etc.
READ ALL OF IT BEFORE DOING ANYTHING!!!
THIS IS A DANGEROUS PROCEDURE AND CAN LEAVE YOU WITH NO CHOICE BUT TO MAKE EITHER NORMAL OR LOW LEVEL FORMAT!!
Getting Rid of Dynamic Drive Overlay
by Dave Lawrence, ICTS Staff—JAARS, Waxhaw dave_lawrence@sil.org
Some people have Ontrack Disk Manager or EZ-Drive on a hard drive that’s larger than 528MB in a desktop computer that’s too old to know about LBA (Logical Block Addressing). If you get a new computer without a hard disk drive (HDD), or a new motherboard, and reuse the same HDD, how do you get rid of the Dynamic Drive Overlay (D.D. Overlay) that Ontrack or EZ put on the HDD, so you can use the LBA capability of the new motherboard BIOS?
There are two or three things to try. Because of certain variables, it is unpredictable how hard it might be to get rid of the D.D. Overlay.
The Dynamic Drive Overlay identifies itself just after the computer’s Power On Self Test (POST) when the system first starts to read the HDD for booting. A blue banner appears on the black and white text mode screen which says Disk Manager or EZ-Drive or whatever your D.D. Overlay is. It says if you want to boot a floppy to press the Space bar, or Shift+ Space, or the combination your system requires. After waiting almost too short a time for you even to get your fingers up to the keys, it proceeds to boot the HDD.
That blue banner with the special key instruction for floppy boot is the thing you want to get rid of.
Warning! The following will destroy everything on your HDD. You must do a backup and be prepared to entirely reinstall your operating system (Windows), application software, your data, everything.
1) Back up your HDD to prepare to lose everything that was on it. Be sure you have a bootable diskette of your operating system. You’ll need a boot disk of DOS 5.0 or above, or Windows 95 startup disk. Your floppy disk should contain COMMAND.COM and the hidden system files, to make it bootable, plus the following DOS files: FDISK.EXE, FORMAT.COM, DEBUG.EXE, and SYS.COM.
2) From DOS (or DOS mode of Windows 95), run Fdisk and delete all partitions on the drive.
3) Restart the computer with no diskette in the A: drive. If the blue banner is gone, skip down to #8 below.
4) Boot your startup floppy and run FDISK/MBR (to rewrite the Master Boot Record). Restart with the A: drive empty. If the blue banner is gone, skip down to #8.
5) Boot your startup floppy and then run the Disk Manager or EZ program from the floppy that either came with the drive or you created using the Seamove program (for Seagate HDD). Most versions of this program have blue menu boxes with yellow or white text (in text mode video). Wade through the menu system of the program until you find an item to Remove Disk Manager (Remove EZ), and run that. That procedure should get rid of the startup blue banner. Afterwards, restart with the A: drive empty. If the blue banner is gone, skip down to #8.
6) If you have no such floppy as in #5 above, or if none of the above works to remove the blue banner, use the following Debug script which I recently discovered. Boot from floppy and run Debug.
7) At Debug’s hyphen prompt, type all the following lines, ending each line with the Enter key:
F 200 L200 0
a 100
mov ax,301
mov bx,200
mov cx,1
mov dx,0080 (Note: use 0081 for second fixed disk)
int 13
int 3
(enter a blank line here)
G=100
q
8) The HDD should have no partitions nor Dynamic Drive Overlay on it. Use Fdisk to set up the drive partition(s), and Format to format it.
9) Reinstall the operating system and restore all software, etc.