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Beat the 504Mb hard disk limit

I have Ontrak Disk Manager 5.1 and 7.02, neither of which is manufacturer specific. They both work on all brands of drives.
 
Caluser2000 said:
Give AnyDrive a shot. Its in RWallmow's link as well.
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Beat me to it, Anydrive will not overcome the 504mb limit, but will allow you to get full capacity out of that 256mb CF card even though your BIOS only has settings for 200mb, this is a different issue than the 504mb limit issue that ontrack deals with.

Stone said:
I have Ontrak Disk Manager 5.1 and 7.02, neither of which is manufacturer specific. They both work on all brands of drives.
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The non manufacturer specific versions were licensed, paid applications. That said, I doubt anyone from ontrack cares anymore, but I still wasn't going to post them on my site, lol
 
It would be naughty of Stone to share them too ;) Unless he has some boxed copies of course.

I'm sure there are other non drive specific DDOs mentioned in previous threads.
 
"MaxBlast OnTrack Disk Manager Version 6.03.05 (1994)"

Just tested, seems to accept a WD hard disk with no problems. (yes, I'm aware that it's Maxtor-branded)

Besides, you can also use any of the others. If everything fails, download "EZDrive Version 7.02 (1992)".
 
Timo W. said:
"MaxBlast OnTrack Disk Manager Version 6.03.05 (1994)"

Just tested, seems to accept a WD hard disk with no problems. (yes, I'm aware that it's Maxtor-branded)
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That's nice, but what about... Areal, Atasi, Brand Technology, CMI, Conner, Data-Tech, E F Industries, Fujitsu, HP, Hitacjhi, Imprimis CDC, IBM, Kalok, Lapine, Micropolis, Microscience, Miniscribe, Mitsubushi, Nec, Newbury, Pacific Magtron, Plus Development, Priam, PTI, Quantum, Rodime, Samsung, Seagate, Siemens, Syquest, Tandon, Toshiba, Tulin, and Vertex in addition to Maxtor and Western Digital? The Complete Ontrack Disk Manager supports all of these types and contains the specific geometrys for all the individual drives.
 
Stone said:
That's nice, but what about... Areal, Atasi, Brand Technology, CMI, Conner, Data-Tech, E F Industries, Fujitsu, HP, Hitacjhi, Imprimis CDC, IBM, Kalok, Lapine, Micropolis, Microscience, Miniscribe, Mitsubushi, Nec, Newbury, Pacific Magtron, Plus Development, Priam, PTI, Quantum, Rodime, Samsung, Seagate, Siemens, Syquest, Tandon, Toshiba, Tulin, and Vertex in addition to Maxtor and Western Digital? The Complete Ontrack Disk Manager supports all of these types and contains the specific geometrys for all the individual drives.
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Areal, that's a brand I haven't thought of in a long time, had one of those pieces of junk in my old Zeos 486 laptop, thing died and I replaced it like 3 times, unfortunately it was an odd form factor, a "short" 2.5" so normal drive wouldn't fit, gave up the last time it failed and recycled the laptop (probably about mid '97), really wish I hadn't done that now with small SSDs and CF>IDE boards that would have fit it easily these days, I LOVED that laptop, lol.
 
Now, one odd thing I noticed on my 486 was that if I partitioned the drive using Linux, it automatically let me use the whole drive in spite of the BIOS limit, and DOS even formatted that partition to the full capacity after I rebooted (1.5 GB drive). But my 486 has an "all-in-one" motherboard that has some kind of custom BIOS programmed by ACER, so I wouldn't expect that to be the normal case. Of course, I don't know if that means it actually accesses the full drive properly, just that it knows the rest is there.
 
Linux doesn't give a tinker's damn about what the BIOS can or can't do. Just so long as it can get the bootloader going (e.g. grub or lilo), the BIOS no longer figures in the picture.

IDE interface adapters (it would be wrong to call them "controllers") haven't changed much (but for high-speed DMA) in the entire time that the ATA standard has been around. It's perfectly possible to hook up a 330GB IDE/PATA drive to an old 386 box with an IDE interface, so long as the drive still supports PIO mode. The details are really in the BIOS software and are mostly due to shortsightedness in the BIOS software implementation.
 
Well yeah, I know Linux kinda does it's own thing. I was more wondering whether having the drive partitioned like that is actually letting DOS write to the whole thing or not. I mean, the format looked like it was writing to the whole thing, but I don't know if that's any indication.
 
You can always set aside/limit a portion of the hard disk for Dos and the rest for Linux using various tools/utilities. This way you can have a dual boot set up on your 486 if you wanted.
 
If you're using LBA mode, you're probably safe, but different BIOSes map the same drive different ways in CHS mode, so be careful with using Linux on older (DOS) drives for partitioning.
 
Chuck(G) said:
If you're using LBA mode, you're probably safe, but different BIOSes map the same drive different ways in CHS mode, so be careful with using Linux on older (DOS) drives for partitioning.
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It doesn't say whether it's LBA mode, but it's the 'AUTO' option rather than any of the numbered drives or the 'MANUAL' option.
 
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