[RESOLVED] HardDrive overlay

[D1]

I have an older bigfoot 8gig drive in which I used the maxtor express disk to partition/fdisk the drive. This process as I know it to be is called a drive overlay. Being I didn't fdisk it myself.

Now the boot sector is trashed on this drive and I'm trying to recover the data. My new computer (C-drive) was installed without this overlay technology.

How could I create a startup disk that includes the necessary files to handle this overlay , repair the boot sector and allow me to view & extract the sensative data.

Thanks,

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[GJFowler]

Hi.
In theory it shouldn't matter that the drive was set up with an overlay, all that did was ensure the drive was accessed correctly by a system with an older bios, by "patching" the bios code each boot-up. It made no change to the data on the drive.

If you only want to install the damaged drive in your current system to access data, the boot code will not be used, so since your new system doesn't need an overlay to address 8G drives correctly, the absence of the overlay will not affect the operation of the drive.

The rest depends on what had been damaged on the drive; Master Boot Record, Partition Table, File Allocation Tables etc.
You may need to use something like Norton Disk Doctor to attempt to recover the drive.

Hope this helps, good luck.

[clascomp]

You need to install the drive as the primary boot drive. Then copy the important stuff off to a drive without an overlay. Depending on the overlay you may need to use Quantums Data eraser utility to kill the overlay before you can properly fdisk and format it again.
http://www.quantum.com/support/csr/s...r_software.htm
On the other hand, Quantum Bigfoots make great patio tiles!!

[NPaladin]

Drive overlay? You should be shot!

The only overlay software I'd use is OnTrack's (Seagate/IBM), because as an option in the setup, it allows you to make a boot disk with the same MBR patch code as what goes on the hard drive.

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Bryan Pizzuti
CompTIA A+, CNAP
[email protected]
ICQ # 8525092
Yahoo Messenger: npaladin_2000

[sly69]

Most overlay software has a program that can rewrite the mbr with either the former or new code for the overlay in the mbr..

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