Hard Drive Overlay Software Needed

[JerriS]

Looking for the drive overlay software for Connor Technologies Drive CT204. Connor Technologies went out of business in 1999 and pulled their website so the software is not available to download.

The problem I have is the drive is a 4.3gb hard drive and WinNT (clean install) only recognizes 2040mb of the entire drive. I loaded Partition Magic 6.0 thinking I could resize the drive and get Error #128 which says that the geometry of the drive is not industry standard and may be caused by a drive overlay software. Use the software diskette to uninstall the software. The software disk did not come with the disk order.

Partition Magic Tech Support suggested I try fdisk /mbr and suggested I get the software to uninstall it otherwise I am stuck with a 2gb drive. Down the road aways, I can see problems with this drive and would like the issue resolved prior to loading any software. I've got 4 drives to work with. My other alternative is RMA'ing the drives but then I am still back to step 1 looking for hard drives 6gb or less that will work in my machines. (HP Vectra Series 7 - PII 233mhz with 64mb memory - bios is current. Even 10gb drives pick up as 8.55gb and then I run into problems with Norton or Mcafee AV software not being able to see the entire drive and error out because they cannot read the MBR. Norton has even corrupted profiles before due to this issue.)

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[ibdewey]

I may be totally off base here, but what size can the primary partition be under WinNt. I was thinking it was 2 GB, but it may be 4 I can't remember. If it is 2 then you may just be able to go under disk administrator and create a second partition for the last 2 GB's of the drive. I'm still suprised your pII won't read over 8 gb's of drive space. Is it the operating system that can only see 8 gb or does the system only recognize 8 when it boots.

 

[Paul Nagel]

Connor was purchased by Seagate and the following link is to there page with details on various Connor hard drives.

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/specs/family_conner.html

I dont know if they have anything that will help or not. Maybe you can figure out what motherboard in installled and if HP has a bios update for that computer, it may be worth looking into. Wish i could offer some real help, as i grew up in Saginaw and we got to stick together, but that NT stuff is not my area. You may want to post a question in the NT forum on the subject.

 

[slipe]

When you boot it will tell you whether there is drive overlay software and what it is. It sounds like PM wants you to format the drive to get whatever is on the drive off. That is often the only way to uninstall the overlay. Seagate has an uninstall in Disc Manager which is part of Disc Wizard. You might not have the Seagate overlay though. http://forum.seagate.com/SERVICE/Em...48324045f5eb0cad862569580048f67f?OpenDocument

It might have come with EZDrive overlay. Some info from Seagate: http://forum.seagate.com/SERVICE/Em...94c5d3e35c4b2e048625695800577eff?OpenDocument

DiscWizard: http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/discwiz.html

 

[Max19]

If the drive is formatted for FAT16, the maximum partition size is 2GB. It sounds like your drive is formatted for FAT16. If it's formatted for NTFS, the maximum system partition size (the partition Windows NT is installed on) is 7GB.

 

[JerriS]

Thanks for all the responses. Connor Technologies is not the Connor that merged with Seagate. Seagate's webite will attest to that if you read the hard drive part #s. Connor Technologies went out of business.

When I installed NT, I selected NTFS not Fat and tried to changed the size to the full 4gb but it would change back automatically to the 2040gb size. The drive shows as NTFS. This will pose a problem when I go to install Norton AntiVirus since my bios sees it as a 4gb drive but the drive itself in NT shows as a 2gb drive. I've run into this issue many times before where Norton gives errors saying it cannot read the MBR. If I cannot find the drive overlay software, I will try to return the drives. Anyone know where to purchase 6gb or less hard drives?

 

[Lurker1]

Hi JerriS

If the bios sees the entire 4 gig then you should not need any overlay software. I would run fdisk from a windows 98 boot disk then enable large disk support. Remove all partitions on the hard drive then create one large fat32 partition. Format the drive. Try to install Nt and see if it sees the entire size of the drive. If so you can leave it at fat32 or change it to NTFS. Deleting all partitions will DELETE ALL YOUR SOFTWARE.

 

[Max19]

Unless you know something I don't, Lurker1, you cannot install Windows NT on a FAT32 partition. You cannot run Windows NT on a FAT32 partition. Your only options are NTFS or FAT16.