250GB Hard drive in older pc causing problems with DDO

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jacob
  • Start date Start date
J

Jacob

I turned an old HP Pavilion PC (500Hz, 256MB RAM, WIN XP SP2) into a
server that I keep all my music on. It just sits in my basement
without a monitor, mouse, or keyboard. I needed to add more storage
space, so I bought a 250GB Hitachi internal hard drive. I installed
it along with Ontrack Dynamic Drive Overlay which came with it. I
figured it needed that because it was an older PC and it's a large hard
drive. It seemed to work well for some time. Then after restarting it
one time, it came to the DDO screen and said to hit spacebar to load CD
(or something like that) I found that unplugging the new hard drive
and restarting, then plugging it back in and restarting again, usually
worked. then it was only a matter of time before it decided not to
work anymore. I would notice that the server pc wasn't functioning,
restart it and find it stuck at that DDO screen. does anyone have any
idea what is going on and how I can fix this?

thanks
 
You are unlikely to have needed any Dynamic Overlay
Winxp sp2 supports large disks and if your large disk was seen in the bios
(without any overlay) then so did your bios.
 
I have a lot of data on this hard drive and no way of backing it up at
this time. I am concerned that fooling around with my setup might
erase my data.
 
It sounds more as if the drive is starting to fail than anything to
do with the DDO. Perhaps one of the sectors occupied by the
DDO software is failing. Check S.M.A.R.T status and/or run Hitachi's
drive diag software, which should include a S.M.A.R.T check.
Check their website for the diagnostic software. (Usually run
from a boot floppy)
 
It's a brand new drive


Bill said:
It sounds more as if the drive is starting to fail than anything to
do with the DDO. Perhaps one of the sectors occupied by the
DDO software is failing. Check S.M.A.R.T status and/or run Hitachi's
drive diag software, which should include a S.M.A.R.T check.
Check their website for the diagnostic software. (Usually run
from a boot floppy)
Click to expand...
 
Even new drives fail. If you have no way to back up the files on the drive
DO NOT attempt to remove the Ontrack software. Doing so will erase the
drive overlay file and wipe out your files. You need to copy off all the
files to another location first then reformat the drive and copy the files
back.

If the bios recognizes the full size of the drive you can reformat the drive
with no problem to remove the overlay.

If the bios won't recognize the drive and you have a spare PCI slot on the
motherboard, purchase a new PCI IDE controller card (about $20.00 or less)
and install it once the data has been copied off so you can use the PCI
card's bios to allow the full use of the drive without an overlay. No PCI
slot, purchase a USB enclosure to attach the drive. It's "bios": will allow
full use of the drive.
 
Back
Top