Hard disk problem

[murph at vmark.com (Dan Murphy)]

At 10:38 AM 11/30/95 -0500, Hsin-Yu Sidney Li wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I am helping a colleague of mine install Linux on his PC.  The PC in
>question was "inherited" from our boss (who has decided to switch to a
>Macintosh), and is a pentium machine from a no-name company.
>
>The problem we are having is that the hard disk (Western Digital model
>AC2700, 700 MB) has on it a "Disk Manager" from a company called
>On-track.  This is code that is on the boot sector of the hard disk,
>supposedly to get around the around the 1024 cylinder problem.  (The
>BIOS is AMIBIOS, which a AMIBIOS date of 07/25/94.)  In any case, we
>couldn't read the partition table, and after calling Western Digital
>and On-track, we ended up fdisk'ing and formatting the hard disk.
>


I'm no jock at this, but I'm in the process of helping a frind myself, who ALSO has On-track. My buddy saw in some doc that you have to disable On-track for the drive you want to install Linux on.

Ha! I found it!

The book "Linux Configuration and Installation" by Volkerding, Reichard & Johnson (MIS Press) has this to say regarding large IDE drives:

"However, if you but one of these mondo drives, you'll need to do a few things before you install Linux on it - or rather, not do a few things..... so most manufacturers ship disk-management software (such as Ontrack's Disk Manager) that allow MS-DOS to deal with large hard drives. Don't install this software (italicized). A program like 'Disk Manager' is designed to work only with MS-DOS or a variant, not Linux or another operating system."

There you go. Good luck.


Dan Murphy                 murph at vmark.com
Vmark Software             74260.3322 at compuserve.com
Westboro, MA