How To Delete Ontrack DDO From My Seagate Drive

Recommended by Wim's BIOS...

I used the maintenance option to remove the DDO but the BIOS was still showing the drive as 32gb, i removed the jumper limiting the drive but still no joy.

any help?

[soupy]

Try a Win98 boot floppy, then FDISK /MBR

i've tried that and it still doesnt work

ive formated C:

ive used FDISK /MBR and SYS C:

when in DOS the drive shows as 80gb but the bios shows it as 32gb still

i try to install win2k but get INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error

[soupy]

I'm assuming your BIOS actually does support 32GB+ ?

[NickS]

soupy wrote:

I'm assuming your BIOS actually does support 32GB+ ?

I should hope so (Can't find an icon for "smirk") as I used Rainbow's utility. My suggestion was that the Seagate OnTrack [edit] (sorry, Disk Wizard)[/edit] disk manager utility has told the drive firmware to report 32GB (like IBM's version does for the Deskstar - Alistair.Kirk had that issue) but I haven't used it so I don't know whether it does and whether it can be reverted. There was someone who posted with a similar problem who found he could get his (Maxtor?) drive reset temporarily using the IBM tool but that it would not stay set. In the end he sent it back and got it replaced under warranty.

@bedford: Look for a copy of ideid.exe and see what it reports.

Also: Zap.exe Zeros first 128 sectors of the HDD - this should wipe out disc overlay boot sector software, but it will not reset capacity reporting if done by drive firmware.

[NickS]

From the horse's mouth:

Here is the procedure for checking or setting the reported drive size:
o Load DiscWizard Starter Edition
o Select "Utilities"
o Select "Set Hard Drive Size"
o Select the correct drive ( if more than one drive installed)
o If the "Current Maximum LBA/CYL" is not equal to the "Native Maximum
LBA/CYL" values, change it to the value in the Native Maximum LBA/CYL
number.
This should force the drive to report the correct size to the BIOS.

If you are still unable to read the full capacity of the drive, use
DiscWizard Starter Edition to run a Zero Fill on the drive. This will
write through the MBR with zero's to remove any remnants of the DDO.

Danny M.
Seagate Technical Support

I've put this in the "collected wisdom".