Hi guys!
in my entire life (33yo), I never did try to put a bigger disk in a old system, recently, a great
friend of mine gave me a Unisys PW2 (486), with the 504mb hdd limit.
I followed this guide succesfully, I put a 8.4GB Seagate HDD on a 486!! 😁 ,

but....

for some weird reason, the system clone the 4 partitions/units C:,D:,E:,F: endlessly to Z:
I tried to limit this, writing LASTDRIVE=F on CONFIG.SYS with no success 😢

Please, any help for this poor guy.

Regards!

Hi guys, I have a question regarding EZ-Drive. I have it installed on my Quantum bigfoot as I was using the HDD in older system. Now I have it installed in a system that can cope and I decided to make the MS DOS a slave to dual boot with Windows 95. The Idea is to put Windows HDD in a removable case set as primary master and plug it in only when I want to boot Windows. The dos disk is supposed to be moved to primary slave. However after I change the disk to primary slave the ez-drive does not detect the system (no system dis or disk error). I tried to disable ex-bios but than the system hangs right after writing Starting MS-DOS.

So I would like to ask if uninstalling EZ-drive will erase all my data or will the system be intact and in bootable state just without the ez-bios? I cannot find any information about this. Can MS DOS 6.22 even start from primary slave if it is the only HDD in the system?

To answery my own question, yes uninstalling EZ-BIOS does not remove data.

manuelink64 wrote:

Hi guys! in my entire life (33yo), I never did try to put a bigger disk in a old system, recently, a great friend of mine gave […]
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Hi guys!
in my entire life (33yo), I never did try to put a bigger disk in a old system, recently, a great
friend of mine gave me a Unisys PW2 (486), with the 504mb hdd limit.
I followed this guide succesfully, I put a 8.4GB Seagate HDD on a 486!! 😁 ,

but....

for some weird reason, the system clone the 4 partitions/units C:,D:,E:,F: endlessly to Z:
I tried to limit this, writing LASTDRIVE=F on CONFIG.SYS with no success 😢

Please, any help for this poor guy.

Regards!

You ever figure this out.. I actually am running into the same issue. Pretty sure it's due to a limit on the size of the media, trying to use a 16gb minisd... getting smaller than that at the store is actually quite hard 🤣. I wouldn't care however the issue is I can't install a CD drive since there aren't enough drive letters available 😒

**edit** Yeah just threw a CF card adapter and a 1gb card and it worked fine wonder what the limit of the software is. I'll probably purchase a 4 and 8gb mini sd off of amazon to test.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Found one :) […]
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philscomputerlab wrote:

I couldn't find anything newer from Western Digital however. Specifically with FAT32 support, so if someone knows about a newer version than 9.03W please let me know.

Found one 😀

It's Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Tools 11.2.

Also based on the same 2004 Ontrack as Seagate's DiscWizard.

Uses just one floppy, but also has a few less options.

But the main features are identical:

- FAT16 and FAT32 supprt
- Boot from CD-ROM on machines that don't support it
- Uses 10 KB more memory compared to EZ-Drive
- Very nice graphical user interface
- Needs 16 MB RAM to load

Just like Seagate's DiscWizard it happily works with CF cards but not with drives from other manufacturers.

i'm at wits end trying to install windows 95 on my 60gb hard drive for my toshiba 400CDT with 75MHz pentium cpu and 16MB ram.....
done all the tricks, ez/-drive, odd etc, trying to boot from cd rom drive and install win95 to no avail. dont want to install win98. i use win98 startup disk to get cd rom support, formateed drives dissapear then 504MB limit appears again

windows 95 is not bootable which is a pain in the a**

finally got it working. now have 8 drives 2gb each (could've partitioned more) and have windows 95 installed and running 😉

I'm have the same problem a couple other people are having, the software duplicates drive letters and I can't install the CD-ROM drive because all the drive letters are taken. With that being said though, if I go through the process of formatting 4 partitions and then UNINSTALL ezdrive, I'm left with 1 good 2gb partition and no duplicate drive letters... which is very nice because 1) EZ drive is not installed at all and 2) it's 4x bigger than the 500mb I used to have.

I don't know what version of EZ-Drive you guys have in comparison to this, but I found a floppy while digging through my dad's old files that shipped with his WD drive. This one claims to support FAT32, so maybe it could be of use to you all. I made the dump with WinImage, so if you want to write it to a floppy you should be able to with that or any other floppy writer supporting the .ima format.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B45ujxJF8aN … eWFKYTBjNFUyU1k

UltimaPlayer12 wrote:

I don't know what version of EZ-Drive you guys have in comparison to this, but I found a floppy while digging through my dad's old files that shipped with his WD drive. This one claims to support FAT32, so maybe it could be of use to you all. I made the dump with WinImage, so if you want to write it to a floppy you should be able to with that or any other floppy writer supporting the .ima format.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B45ujxJF8aN … eWFKYTBjNFUyU1k

Phil's version are 9.03W (in the youtube video)
but in his website, is the same version as you, 9.06W

thanks anyways 🤣

manuelink64 wrote:

Phil's version are 9.03W (in the youtube video) but in his website, is the same version as you, 9.06W […]
Show full quote

UltimaPlayer12 wrote:

I don't know what version of EZ-Drive you guys have in comparison to this, but I found a floppy while digging through my dad's old files that shipped with his WD drive. This one claims to support FAT32, so maybe it could be of use to you all. I made the dump with WinImage, so if you want to write it to a floppy you should be able to with that or any other floppy writer supporting the .ima format.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B45ujxJF8aN … eWFKYTBjNFUyU1k

Phil's version are 9.03W (in the youtube video)
but in his website, is the same version as you, 9.06W

thanks anyways 🤣

Ah okay, well I'll leave that up as an alternate mirror until it gets taken down automatically or the bandwidth limit is exceeded 🤣 sorry to waste your time guys

Has anyone had this running with drives over 160gb? And how about when using a sata-ide adapter? Only ide drives I have are 320gb and 500, but plenty of satas that are 80.

Its doubtful a 48-bit LBA compatible version of EZ-Drive was released. Whatever is out there likely works on drives up to 137GB. Ontrack's Disk Manager might have gotten a 48-bit LBA revision though.

Hi, I have an old 386SX laptop, that currently has an 80MB hdd. I want to change it for a 4GB Compact Flash, have the adaptor but can't install EZ-Drive due to not having floppy disks.

Is there any way to install it without floppy?

You could try doing it under vmware/virtualbox machine that would have access to physical CF card (and virtual floppy).

i've tried with virtualpc, virtualbox and vmware, can't mount the physical drive.

nevermind, i've bought some new floppy disks and see what happens

I found this link with older DDO software on it http://vintage-pc.tripod.com/hdd_utils.html Might be useful the someone.

Responding to an old message here, but:

NJRoadfan wrote:

-They change the partition type of the drive to prevent any other machines from accessing the contents of the drive. This used to not be a problem in the Windows 9x days as you could kick start a machine with an EZDrive or Ontrack equipped floppy, but its not possible with Windows NT based OSes. This eliminates the convenience of popping a CF card into a reader on a modern machine. Also in many cases, one might inadvertently format a drive with data on it thinking its blank.

I'll probably start a separate thread on this, but if my experience with Ontrack Disk Manager is any guide, it's not difficult to mount a CF card that has a drive overlay installed using any Linux PC and a CF card reader. (The same applies if using a modern large IDE drive and a USB adapter.)

The "mount" command for VFAT in Linux supports an offset, which in my case was 0xFC00 (64512), where the MS-DOS 5.0 boot sector is located.

So in Ubuntu, the full command to mount the CF card of my Compaq Portable II is:

sudo mount -t vfat -o offset=64512,noexec,rw,umask=0000 /dev/sdx /mnt

Where /dev/sdx is my card reader (/dev/sdd in my case).

This may have been answered already but the latest from Western Digital is Data Lifeguard (DLG) 11.2. This comes as a bootable ISO and has a really elaborate GUI. It's basically OnTrack Disk Manager (one of the 9.x versions - dated 2004). It feels like the GUI hides a few options from the user, and the overlay has the usual issues including embedding in some of base 640k memory. I will upload to vogonsdrivers later today.

Great topic here. One question:

Can I use Any PATA IDE drive? Cheap ones are available with 160Gb. Capacity.
Using fat with msdos and fine to stick to 4x 2gb partitions at all. Question is only whether ez/on track will accept these large disks since I read something about 8gb max

Thank you.

I tried and also 160 Gb HDDs ain’t no problem. Although I manage to only use 8GB of it via 4 fat16 partitions.

Interestingly after installing on track drive overlay system wouldn’t boot anymore so I removed the drive overlay again. The system was then booting again successfully my os also with 8 gb so I’m unsure about the added value here. My bios allows max 2gb hdd to be selected though. Maybe real benefits come with boards having the 504mb imitations.