Re: removing OnTrack DDO
I have no direct experience with Ontrack, but it sounds like you have a
vaild (non-ONTrack) partition table in the MBR sector of that disk since
you can access it as a slave or after booting from a floppy. But the
OnTrack DDO code is still residing in that sector, which comes into play
when you boot from that disk.
Getting rid of it should be just matter of replacing that code by
overwriting it with some other boot loader such as Lilo - after booting
from the floppy. I would definitely make a backup copy of that sector
first with the dd command - just in case. At least then you have a
record of the partition table values to work from if something goes
wrong.
Additional note: I believe Ontrack normally keeps it's own special
partition table in the MBR (sector 1) which is unusable except by the
Ontrack boot code, and then keeps the actual partition table at an
offset of 63 sectors from that. Since you can access the partitions on
that disk without Ontrack being loaded, it would seem that your real
partition table is in the first sector - unless Linux is smart enough to
figure out all of Ontrack's nonsense on it's own.
Tom
Hamish Moffatt wrote:
>
> Summary: is it possible to remove OnTrack Disk manager/Dynamic Drive
> Overlay without trashing everything on the disk?
>
> Long version: I have two disks in one PC; /dev/hda and /dev/hdb. hdb has
> DDO installed on it from when it served in a DOS PC with old BIOS. When
> I installed, I needed the data intact; later I migrated the data to
> ext2 partitions on the same disk, all without removing DDO. Linux can
> handle DDO's munging just fine, and the boot disk /dev/hda didn't have it,
> so no problem.
>
> Now I want to swap them (hdb is a lot bigger than hda); everything works
> ok, except I can't boot off the big disk. The DDO runs and says invalid
> BIOS translations are being used -- I chose LBA mode. I can boot off floppy
> ok, which is what I have been doing. I'd prefer to remove DDO, if it's
> easy.
>
> thanks,
> Hamish
> --
> Hamish Moffatt VK3TYD hamish@debian.org, hamish@rising.com.au
> Latest Debian packages at ftp://ftp.rising.com.au/pub/hamish. PGP#EFA6B9D5
> CCs of replies from mailing lists are welcome. http://hamish.home.ml.org
>
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