Hard Drives using OnTrack Disk Manager

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Last Updated: 29th December, 1994


Symptoms

  OS/2 installation is unable to access drive, is unable to set one
  or more partitions installable, or reports unusual drive partition
  sizes.

Hardware

  Large IDE drive with more than 1024 cylinders (presumably SCSI and
  ESDI as well) using OnTrack Disk Manager software (a.k.a.  "Drive
  Rocket").


Problem

  OnTrack Disk Manager is incompatible with operating systems
  other than DOS, including  OS/2. It uses non-standard partition
  descriptions which can make the drive appear to be unreadable or
  uninitialized.


Fix

  Back up all partitions on drives which are using OnTrak and remove
  OnTrack from the drives prior to installing OS/2.  Partitions can
  be created under OS/2 beyond the "FAT Barrier" by using the OS/2
  FDISK or FDISKPM programs, and formatting the new partitions to use
  the OS/2 High Performance File System (HPFS).


Notes

  This wil hopefully become less of a problem in the near future.
  IBM, Western Digital, and OnTrack are currently working on a
  solution to the Disk Manager-OS/2 incompatibility.

For now, any system with a large IDE drive larger than 1024 cylinders (generally over 500 Mb) set up as one large partition probably has Disk Manager installed, and should check carefully before installing OS/2 Wapr Version 3 (or any version of OS/2).


Specific tips on removing Disk Manager and re-partitioning would be appreciated.


See also


Frank McKenney