Dealing with a Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO)?

Here's the situation: A few years ago I bought a 100GB Maxtor drive off eBay. I ran an installation utility which I downloaded from the Maxtor website. I think that utility automatically installed a DDO on the drive. From research I have done on the Internet I believe the DDO is causing problems with my attempts to upgrade my PC from W98 to XP. Apparently, I need to remove the DDO (and Maxtor has a utility that can do this).

I have a couple of questions and concerns. Is there a way I can verify that I actually have a DDO on the drive? Will removing the DDO wipe out my data? Is there something I can look for in my BIOS that will tell me that I do not need a DDO?

Thanks.

 

If the there is a DDO on the boot drive, you should see a screen asking if you want to boot from a floppy disk just before the Windows screen comes up. The DDO Maxtor uses is EZ Bios, so the DDO screen may state that.

I have only tried it twice with EZ Bios. The first time was a disaster and resulted in a low-level (zero) format. The second time I got the Maxtor utilities to back up the MBR first, removed EZ Bios and created a new MBR. That went fine.

Be prepared that it could easily go wrong. A lot of people just advise to do a low-level format. If there are any errors left in the MRB, it could cause ongoing minor problems. If the uninstall of the DDO is successful, use Sandra in my signature to benchmark the drive (or you could run the tests/benchmarks at www.pcpitstop.com).

Most motherboard manufacturers do not disclose the "BIOS limitation" for HDDs. The main place I think you would find it is in the information for BIOS upgrades for the motherboard. It may state something like "Increases the size of hard disk drives recognized to ***Gb ".

Sorry I can't be more specific and removing those DDOs was a few years ago now.

Matt