Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2004 08:57:39 +0800 From: Raymond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [LIB] Serious boot problem - Help needed!
At 05:04 AM 17/02/2004 -0800, you wrote:
Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2004 14:03:22 +0100 From: Philip Nienhuis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [LIB] Serious boot problem - Help needed!
Matt Hanson wrote: : <snip> : > >lose everything on the HD at this point if you do anything with it. > > I got 'smart' a while back, and now keep all my data on d: e:... etc. > drives. So I could put the drive in another system with a 2.5" > 3.5" > adapter, and just copy the data over to another drive.... expect for one > problem... EZ-BIOS. The only desktop around here is a 1999 Gateway PII > 450MHz system running straight W98, no Win98SE. So I've never gotten the > Gateway to see anything over 8GB on this 20GB Hitachi.
That has nothing to do with straight Win98 or whatever runs on your desktop.
Your desktop (and for that matter, any other PC where you put in your Libretto hard disk) can only see the MBR on the first cylinder where EZ-drive resides. After "pre"-booting from this MBR EZ-drive takes over and fools the operating systems on your harddisk by presenting them with _another_ MBR which shows all of the disk space. That MBR may be on the second cylinder or on the first but another track. The big problem here is EZ-drive.
I know this might not be a tremendous help in Matt's situation but I know Red Hat Linux 6.x and above and Win2k (and I think even NT4) will detect the presence of EZ-Drive on a secondary HDD and read the drive correctly (as if EZ-Drive was already loaded, even if you don't boot off the drive with EZ-Drive). Linux is a little funny in that it only does this if the FIRST partition on the disk is OK (that's how it detects EZ-Drive). I'm pretty sure they have specific code to do this though. Likewise, many newer disk management programs such as Partition Magic have code to tiptoe around EZ-Drive (later versions of PowerQuest software even scream and moan if they detect EZ-Drive on the HDD but no EZ-Drive loaded in memory).
I've not read the rest of the posts in this thread (I've been on holiday in New Zealand and won't get a chance to clear my backlog of list emails for a day or so yet!) so this advice might well be completely useless but my first impression is, if you have access to a Win2k or a Linux box it might be worth giving that a try at reading the disk. Even using Linux DD might be enough to 'image' the partition off to another drive. *shrug*, just a suggestion ...
- Raymond
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