Lets dig deeper into something which has been simmering all along.... Dynamic Drive OVERLAY HOW can you use a booter when your hard disk uses an OVERLAY.
You will remember that in some machines an overlay needs to load so as to get full capacity of hard drive seen.
This also means that when Overlay is needed, you should not boot straight from your windows 98 CDROM to do the fdisking.. and.. YOU CAN ONLY BOOT OFF A FLOPPY IF YOU MADE IT LOAD AN OVERLAY)
sidenote; You could burn a bootable CDR that loads DDO once you have made a floppy that loads DDO. After all, you can use the DDO enabled floppy as boot image.
How does DDO aka, Dynamic Drive Overlay manifest itself?
Typically, when booting from a hard drive to which an overlay is installed, the overlay will pause for a moment and allow you to insert the floppy you wish to boot from.
Sadly, in puters, nothing is "typical"
Even when it once was typical, you won't no longer always see the message... and may still have overlay.
Microsoft has some tips
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q186057
In that article you can read that NOT ALL overlays show themselves during boot.
(I was also thinking about BIOS and windows splash screens hiding these messages.)
I will have to assume that you just read that article.
Now, suppose that the message you "normally" see,
for instance : "press spacebar to boot from floppy"
got loaded from config.sys/autoexec.bat, and these are "somehow" deleted...
Hmmm, you'll no longer see no message (and yet, the overlay may still be there, in MBR. And then you are called to have a look at that machine ...)
There is something else about overlay.
You should NOT use fdisk /mbr on these drives...
fdisk /mbr
WARNING : If your hard drive was prepared by a third-party disk manager program, such as Ontrack Disk Manager, then the fdisk /mbr command removes the overlay program of that third-party disk manager, such as the Overlay Manager, and the drive no longer starts. Therefore, you must make sure that the drive was not partitioned with a third-party disk manager program before you use this command. Run the Repair utility to verify and recover Windows startup files.
The fdisk /mbr command works only on hard disk drives that are within the limitations of DOS. If you are accessing devices that are beyond the 1024 cylinder limit, you cannot run fdisk /mbr and you receive error code 1762.
now, THIS IS INTERESTING...
If a virus has infected the Master Boot Record (MBR), you cannot run the Emergency Repair Disk until the virus is cleaned. Most virus programs have the same limitation as DOS so you cannot run a scan against the hard disk drive; however, DOS 6.22 Msav.exe will clean the MBR and RAM of the computer.
This was quoted from this article.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q122221
Jeesh, I don't know my luck.
Can you believe I still have MSAV.EXE file in my DOS folder ?
Another quick hop to booters, AV and overlay...
http://service4.symantec.com/SUPPORT/nav.nsf/docid/2000040516340706
... And, now that you all know that, you will prolly go to drive manufactors to download the tool you need.
Here are a few links
http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/rebuild_dm_ddo.html
http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/dmbootd.html
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/discwiz.html
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/index.html
http://maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/
http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/download.htm#diskmgr2k
http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp
http://www.fujitsu.com/download/hdds/
you won't find it no more at fujitsu, but here is a quick tip;
just google for dmdisk.exe
http://www.samsungelectronics.com
Overlay creation tools SHOULD allow you to make a boot diskette that includes the overlay to support your drive while booting from floppy, and all of the drive manufactor diskmanagers I have looked at thus far provide this option
(quite often in the utility's advanced menus.)
(by extention, you can create a bootable CD with the DDO enabled diskette as boot image)
So, if you find out or KNOW your hard drive needs an overlay, you had better get to making yourself a few of them floppies. Believe me, it WILL be your only available tool one day... so you had better make them things. I know, you could make just one, but floppies do go bad, so you better have more than one. Once you can boot with overlay support loaded, you can use all them other utilities you have on floppies or CDROM (if you made one that supports CDROM) or hard drive.
