I had the same alarm bells going off. The ONTRACK disk overlay and Linux have always been incompatible (or so I thought). If your bios has SMART capability, I assume that your mobo is new, so I can't figure out why you would need ONTRACK, except that ONTRACK is installed on your old drive. You must use ONTRACK to remove ONTRACK, if I remember correctly, because a simple dos format won't do the trick. My bet is that the ONTRACK manager is fubaring your installs with modern systems, and your best bet is to use the ONTRACK boot disk to rid your drive of it. Mind you, all this stuff is from memory, because it has been years since I used a disk manager.
e. > > Last week was very frustrating. The slave Maxtor drive went back to PC > > Peripherals (this was an OEM drive), so I decided to continue the > > dual-boot Win95B and Mandrake 9.1 system on the remaining master Western > > Digital drive. > > > > Total disaster. Linux wouldn't install from the Boxed CDs. Bash, > > kernel, and up to 30 different packages wouldn't install. Never would > > boot up. > > > > > Eventually (after 5 days I finally went back to Ontrack's Disk Manager > > and MS-Dos 5.0 to get the Western Digital to format in FAT16) I was able > > to install Win95B and Windows NT 4.0. I then reformatted and got NT 4.0 > > running and am using it now. > > > > Whereas Mandrake 9.1 is new and sophisticated enough to know about HDD > > S.M.A.R.T. Capability and was using it to write to a drive that didn't > > support it. Hence all the problems with Linux files on the Western > > Digital. > > > > Anyone know different? > > > > The Other > > The Other: > My bet is that SMART is a red herring, and that there are some more basic > hardware problems involved. Here's why: > > (1) You last did a hardware upgrade in 1998, (2) you had to use Ontrack > Disk Manager and DOS 5 to partition and format the drive as FAT16, and (3) > you're running Win95B and NT 4.0. All of this is old technology -- much > older than anticipated by either Mandrake or 30 gb drives. > > I'm particularly concerned about the reference to Ontrack Disk Manager. My > only experience with this program (circa 1991) was to enable the use of > larger disks than the system BIOS could handle. It did this by loading a > DOS overlay in CONFIG.SYS. I understand that later versions diddle the MBR > (Hmmm... lilo also fiddles with the MBR). > > OTOH, you speak of running Mandrake 9.1, and that confuses the hell out of > me. How about telling us more about your hardware? Motherboard, BIOS (any > updates), RAM, drives would be especially interesting.
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