First post, by starrlord
Hey folks, I wrote the below utility to make it easy for people like myself who have an older machine that uses Ontrack Disk Overlay, but still want to be able to copy data to the Ontrack drive's partition's from a modern Windows system. You generally don't need Ontrack if you've got XT-IDE, but until then, this works pretty well.
My hope is that it's useful to someone other than myself.
Ontrack Volume Mounter GUI - Windows tool for mounting Ontrack volumes
Made a Windows GUI tool to mount Ontrack Disk Manager volumes on modern systems. Figured it might be useful for others dealing with CF cards and vintage drives.
What it does
Mounts Ontrack volumes using ImDisk with the correct 64,512-byte offset. No more firing up old hardware just to access files on a CF card.
Main features:
- Auto-detects partitions on Ontrack volumes
- Handles extended partitions and logical drives
- Read-only mounting by default (safer)
- Only scans USB/removable drives
- Modern WPF interface
Why I built this
Got tired of the usual workflow: pull CF card from retro machine, realize Windows can't see it, put it back, boot old system, transfer files over network. Now you can just mount the Ontrack volume directly.
Perfect for IDE-to-CF setups where you need Ontrack on the vintage machine but want easy file access on modern Windows.
The tool handles all the offset math and partition detection automatically.
Technical notes
Ontrack places the real MBR at sector 63 and offsets partitions by another 63 sectors. This tool accounts for that and can parse the resulting partition tables, including extended partitions with logical drives.
Uses ImDisk's offset mounting feature so no data gets copied around.
Download
GitHub: https://github.com/starrlord/OntrackMounterGUI
Releases: https://github.com/starrlord/OntrackMounterGU … eleases/tag/1.2
Let me know if this helps anyone else dealing with Ontrack volumes. Always interested in hearing what vintage systems people are working with.