EZ BIOS overlay: How do you remove it?

[Rat]

Very easy.... Put your EZ Bios floppy in (should be part of the Max Blast floppy you made) and use the utility to remove it. You will have to disable the EZ Bios first, then reboot, go back into the EZ Bios utility and uninstall it. Some times it takes a couple shots to remove it.

Rat...

[Southern Belle]

Hi,

Had the overlay on drive and is problem as he mentioned it only puts a 3byte area on your hard disk but if you remove it? make your going to format in windows afterwards your data wont be there.

The software states it can be removed without noticable problems but after a few boots whamooo pooof !!

Ez drive was from [i think] western digital orginally and then purchased by another company to take it over or something or other. Did the whole nine yards email with them still have it in back ups.

Maxtor drives??? installed one on my moms pain in the azzzz read fine print and when formating the drive ...with win98 full setup etc. didnt notice it untill later but it didnt do the 10 megs only 2megs why? donno just the fine print in maxtor.

Now I dont know if others have had problems with maxtor prefs different for everyone.

Well good luck and let me know if you want me to search for those specs.

SB

[Etruscan]

I have a 15GB Maxtor hooked up to an 8.4 GB BIOS. I used the Max Blast utility, that Maxtor supplies on their net site, to partition the drive and install EZ BIOS. EZ BIOS is some kind of 'overlay' that is installed in the 'boot sector' of the drive that recognizes the whole 15 gigabytes of the drive. When EZ BIOS is installed, you must boot from the drive that has EZ BIOS on it in order for the machine to recognize the drive where EZ BIOS is installed. Booting from any other drive you lose drive C:\. I am installing a new motherboard with a BIOS for drives >8.4. Now I want to remove EZ BIOS from the boot sector, without losing all the information on the drive. Does anyone know how to do this? Maxtor has a document, #24019, on it's site for restoring a corrupted boot sector. Does anyone know if these instructions will work to get rid of EZ BIOS? The instructions don't mention getting rid of EZ BIOS specifically. They just talk about restoring the boot sector in general. Any help much appreciated.

[benchristian]

don't know what everyone's problem with EZ-BIOS is...and i haven't had any trouble with my 25.5 gig maxtor drive...installation was a breeze.

[Etruscan]

Thanks Rat. I got got a reply from Maxtor's technical assistance and they said essentially the same thing as you did. They did say I have to test to see if the LBA of the new board and EZ BIOS LBA match. If so, you can remove it with a routine in Max Blast. Also, the low level format in Power Max will remove it along everything else on the drive.

Thanks for sharing some interesting thoughts SB.

I don't have any complaints about Maxtor drives either BenChristian. Really, its my own fault. I knew I was going to be changing boards some day, but the sins of greed and pride spurred me on to use EZ BIOS so I could get 15Gigs instead of a safe and modest 8.4. Now I want to get rid of it and I have to pay for my sins in this hell of toil over a keyboard and motherboard.

Thanks everybody. Now back to changing the mother board and Max blasting EZ BIOS.

[Paul Hubrich]

Why do you insist on removing EZ-BIOS?? I did the same thing as you - installed a new drive on an old motherboard, then installed the drive on a new motherboard. I just left the EZ-BIOS on. Other than the extra few seconds at boot time, I notice no performance problem. The drive benchmarks fine - it's running at full ATA 66 speed. I know its kind of annoying having something on there that you don't need, but why mess with it if its not causing a problem??

[Biff]

Why put up with the annoyance ?

[Etruscan]

If anyone follows this - it worked!! I used the Max Blast utility, under "advanced" options. Just like Rat said, you disable EZ BIOS; watch for a warning box that tells you if your BIOS has the drive under control; exit; test the drive with scandisk(if an error occurs, you cannot remove EZ BIOS); then return to the Max Blast and use a "remove EZ BIOS permantly" option and it's gone. Cool.

Paul asks: why remove EZ BIOS?? Well, isn't it nice to be able to boot from other drives and still have access to your HD? It is a bit like having a boot sector virus that keeps you locked out. You can install windows booting from the CD. You can put the drive on other computers or on the original as master or slave. With EZ BIOS the drive has to be hooked up master. If you do get a boot sector virus, it is easier to fix without having to replace EZ BIOS as well as repair the boot sector in order to regain control of the drive. Those are the reasons I can think of off hand. Anyway, it's fixed and the new ATA 66 board pretty fast too.