Needed: Drive overlay software

[linuxlove]

i need some software for my Toshiba 400CDT. it has a BIOS limit of 2GB, so i need overlay software. i have some Seagate overlay software, but it is an unregistered edition and will only work for Seagate hard drives.

[Chuck(G)]

i need some software for my Toshiba 400CDT. it has a BIOS limit of 2GB, so i need overlay software. i have some Seagate overlay software, but it is an unregistered edition and will only work for Seagate hard drives.

What brand of hard drive do you have? I may have a copy that works for your brand.

[southbird]

What kinds of overlay software are there? The only ones I've ever known of are Seagate and a couple editions of EZ-BIOS. I have an oversized hard drive in a 286 that has no user-defined types and always wondered if a proper overlay could take advantage of it. (Pre-installing EZ-BIOS makes it crash on boot; running the EZ-BIOS setup versions I have while installed simply freeze early in the startup.)

[TNC]

What kinds of overlay software are there? The only ones I've ever known of are Seagate and a couple editions of EZ-BIOS. I have an oversized hard drive in a 286 that has no user-defined types and always wondered if a proper overlay could take advantage of it. (Pre-installing EZ-BIOS makes it crash on boot; running the EZ-BIOS setup versions I have while installed simply freeze early in the startup.)

Most of them require a 386... but, I sucessfully used a 1,7gb HDD in a 504mb limited 286 BIOS. I formatted and installed dos on a another PC and it worked. :)

[linuxlove]

What brand of hard drive do you have? I may have a copy that works for your brand.
It's an IBM Portable DeathStar hard drive (IBM TravelStar)


Most of them require a 386... but, I sucessfully used a 1,7gb HDD in a 504mb limited 286 BIOS. I formatted and installed dos on a another PC and it worked. :)
I don't think I have anything to worry about, this toshiba is a Pentium based system.

[southbird]

Actually the great limiter in my place seemed to be that EZ-BIOS only functioned if Sectors-per-track was set to 63; it could basically have anything else in the Cylinders/Heads department. But the 286 only had "17" for all entries, which simply did not work. So if there was a way to get the 286 to register 63 spt, it might've worked... if it means anything, EZ-BIOS would "crash" identically to the Pentium-M I installed it on and the 286. That is, it spewed the exact same garbage to the screen.

[Chuck(G)]

Hitachi (i.e. Deathstar) drives used to be shipped with a copy of Ontrack Disk Manager, if that's any help. It's out there, if you look. Maybe someone has the Hitachi installation CD for one of these drives.

[southbird]

Hitachi (i.e. Deathstar) drives used to be shipped with a copy of Ontrack Disk Manager, if that's any help. It's out there, if you look. Maybe someone has the Hitachi installation CD for one of these drives.

I have a copy of that, but it actually seemed like it refused to install any BIOS override on the drive I had, but that may have had more to do with the fact that the BIOS "could" handle the drive I was trying it in. Long story... maybe I'll try it again...

[Ole Juul]

I used to use ANYDRIVE.EXE but I'm not sure it will solve your problem. Get the zip here (http://files.chatnfiles.com/Modem-Madness/modem.madness/smmutils/00index.html). There's probably a few other things you want from there anyway. :)

[linuxlove]

i got AnyDrive, tried it and i am afraid to say that IT WORKED! i set it up and it partitioned and formatted the hard drive OK.This laptop is now happily running Winows 98 Beta 3 and wroks great. Thanks.

[southbird]

ANYDRIVE: "Cylinders must be between 100 and 2048" D:

Well, now it's up to 1GB / 6GB, a much better ratio

[Chuck(G)]

Along the lines of supporting very large volumes on older versions of DOS...

Has anyone considered implementing extfs or NTFS or HPFS filesystems on a local hard drive and mapping it in as a network drive? You'd leave a small primary partition for booting, but leave the bulk of the drive for the other filesystem.

CD drivers (e.g. MSCDEX) do this and I've had to write a couple of drivers for non-DOS floppy filesystems, so I know it's possible. Network access is performed by name, not by physical sector. This would get around the limitations of the FAT16 filesystem.

Just a thought....

[lutiana]

i got AnyDrive, tried it and i am afraid to say that IT WORKED! i set it up and it partitioned and formatted the hard drive OK.This laptop is now happily running Winows 98 Beta 3 and wroks great. Thanks.

How badly does this affect the system performance and how much RAM does anydrive take up?

Is the overlay loaded in the MBR or from the OS itself? If from the OS does that mean the primary partition has to be no larger than 504mb?

And a side question, what happens if you created a 2gb FAT 16 parition in another machine, installed the OS (DOS) and then installed it into a machine with the 504mb limit?

[Chuck(G)]

How badly does this affect the system performance and how much RAM does anydrive take up?

Not much, probably about 1K. It doesn't take much code to access an IDE hard disk. If you check the total memory at boot on your system after the DDO-ed drive has booted, you'd probably find that you have 1K less memory than you did before. A small price. Understand that the DDO has to load before the operating system and then keep the OS from overwriting the DDO code. The usual way is to load the DDO at the top of conventional memory and reduce the "total memory" from 640K to 639K.


Is the overlay loaded in the MBR or from the OS itself? If from the OS does that mean the primary partition has to be no larger than 504mb?

The docs for Anydrive say itt's kept in the MBR track. Disk Manager and other commercial DDO's take an entire track, offsetting the new "expanded" disk by one track and then fix up the INT 13H calls so that the first physical disk track is invisible after booting.

The primary partition can be 2GB; there's no 504MB limit.


And a side question, what happens if you created a 2gb FAT 16 parition in another machine, installed the OS (DOS) and then installed it into a machine with the 504mb limit?

Unless the drive was configured with a DDO, the second machine probably wouldn't boot. If you installed the drive as the second drive, the second machine couldn't access the data, as it would be using the 504MB-lmited BIOS.

[lutiana]

ANYDRIVE: "Cylinders must be between 100 and 2048" D:

Well, now it's up to 1GB / 6GB, a much better ratio

Hmm, so now my 8gb drive that was coming up as 504 is coming up as 1024 since I can't get to go over 2048 cylinders (the drive is actually 16368).

So for a seagate drive (or any drive) what is the recommended overlay that will get me to 8gb (or beyond).

[Chuck(G)]

Seagate uses OnTrack for its DDO. Google for "Seagate DiscWizard Starter Edition"--it's all over the web.

[lutiana]

Seagate uses OnTrack for its DDO. Google for "Seagate DiscWizard Starter Edition"--it's all over the web.

I managed to find version 10.something and installed it. It works flawlessly BUT chews up 15kb of base memory. This would not matter much for Windows 9x or NT but for DOS it is a pretty sizable drop.

Any ideas on what version is the best to run for DOS (ie chews up the least amount of memory)?

[Chuck(G)]

I managed to find version 10.something and installed it. It works flawlessly BUT chews up 15kb of base memory. This would not matter much for Windows 9x or NT but for DOS it is a pretty sizable drop.

Any ideas on what version is the best to run for DOS (ie chews up the least amount of memory)?

I suspect that the software there is doing a lot more (SmartDrive?) than simply handling the DDO stuff.

I probably have a couple of older versions of the Ontrack DDO for Seagate. If you'd like, I can dig through my files...

[Mike Chambers]

EZ-Drive has worked well for me.

[lutiana]

EZ-Drive has worked well for me.

I can't seem to find an old version of this to use. Any ideas where I can look?

[MikeS]

I can't seem to find an old version of this to use. Any ideas where I can look?
See if anything here works for ya:

http://members.shaw.ca/rinocanada/hdutils.htm

[lutiana]

See if anything here works for ya:

http://members.shaw.ca/rinocanada/hdutils.htm

Thanks for the link, it was exactly what I was looking for.

What version do you use?

I have installed Maxblast Plus (version 1?) and it uses 5kb of RAM. I can live with this, but if there is one that uses even less I'd be happier.

[MikeS]

Thanks for the link, it was exactly what I was looking for.

What version do you use?

I have installed Maxblast Plus (version 1?) and it uses 5kb of RAM. I can live with this, but if there is one that uses even less I'd be happier.
Glad you found it useful.

I've used Disk Manager when I had to replace/upgrade hard drives on old laptops where the BIOS only had one or two HD type entries; never a problem and pretty well transparent except when you need to boot from floppy.

Almost every drive maker used to supply a free version, but it looks like a few years ago most of them stopped that, although there are other interesting free tools around.