Dynamic Disk Overlay - removal?
 

I bought a 120 gig Maxtor drive and stupidly allowed DDO while messing around in DOS. I now can't undo it - my bios wouldn't recognise a larger drive which is why I was seeing what DDO did. I'm now stuck with a day old drive showing just 30 odd gigs of it's capacity. I tried Maxtors site and they suggest putting the drive in another P.C with a newer bios. Tried this but no luck. My 30 odd gig limit remains.

I'm getting very peeved now, not to mention very annoyed at myself for "fiddling". Can anyone help me get rid of this annoyance? Or have I wasted £60. Thanks.

Re: Dynamic Disk Overlay - removal?
 

I am sure that running maxblast or a similar program will give you the option to remove it..... The only other option is to use something like norton disk editor to write 000's over the start of the disk....

Try running maxblast again m8

Re: Dynamic Disk Overlay - removal?
 

Have to say I now avoide maxtor drives all togeather. In my experience if you dont partion / format them with maxblst you can have nightmare probs. For me needing a proprietary format / partition util is not acceptable.

Just my experience.

Re: Dynamic Disk Overlay - removal?
 

would zero filling it help , maxtor have a utility on there site to do that :)

Re: Dynamic Disk Overlay - removal?
 

Wow, I never knew they needed one. Never had a Maxtor before, I only ever use Western Digital.

Re: Dynamic Disk Overlay - removal?
 

They dont need one - Erol is correct - these third party format/partition utils are crap.......

Retrovertigo - Try and get rid of the software using maxblast then use fdisk or xp disk manager as needed !

Re: Dynamic Disk Overlay - removal?
 

That's always what I thought. I might be wrong but on a recent PC build with a new up to date motherboard and a new maxtor 40gig drive the following was my experience.

1. Used Fdisk and format from a win98se boot disk on the drive.

2. All appeared to partition / format ok

3. Started to install win98se from cd.

4. Just had horrendous problems as the hd started to corrupt files all over the place during install.

5. Went back to step one again. Tried to install win98se again and had several errors and crashes but eventualy got win98se installed.

6. Continue problems - no stability - files corrupting all over the place including registry.

7. Downloaded maxblast (on another machine) and copied it to boot floppy.

8. Partitioned and formated usinf maxblast (and selecting win98se as os)

9. Installed win98se fine and its been fine since.

Now as I understand it there is no reason why any HD would need a proprietary format util - but that was my expereince. Thus it seems to me that not using maxblast with maxtor drives is not a good idea. I may just have been unlucky I guess and the inital problems I had may not have been related to the HD but it certainly seemd that way to me. Anyway I will be avoiding maxtor drives in the future, just in case.

Re: Dynamic Disk Overlay - removal?
 

It's strange how some people can have problems while others don't.
I've never had a problem with maxtor, including the thousands I used in the MoD

Re: Dynamic Disk Overlay - removal?
 

OK...what's happened is. Maxtor say that if your bios doesn't support such a large drive - that I need to put the drive in another P.C to remove the DDO. But that's far easier said than done. I'll have another scout about on their site. I tried formatting it whilst on my own P.C but it still shows up as only being 33 gigs. I have had Maxtor drives many times before and they have always been great. I went for one again because of the ability to simply clone my old drive instead of reinstalling windows xp again.

I'll keep persevering. I was kind of hoping there would be a small utility that simply went.."aha, a drive that has DDO, I'll simply wipe it clean". things are never that eays though eh?

Many thanks for the replies so far.

Re: Dynamic Disk Overlay - removal?
 

Have a look here - http://members.shaw.ca/rinocanada/hdutils.htm

It confirms that the same software can be used for removal of DDO..

HTH