Richard Miller said:
I bought a 200 gig hard drive and read the directions and put disk
manager on my XP C:\ and configured the big hard drive and it works
real good. I went into disk manager and went from 137 gigs to 200
gigs and I was so proud of myself until I tried to image my C:\ with
Drive Image 5.0 and because of the Disk Manager which I can not get
off and did not need in the first place, I now can not Image my C:\.
So this is the second time today I feel stupid today. Does anyone
have any suggestions for me that might help me get an image of my
C:\. I am on the phone trying to get help for Drive Image 7.0 and it
has been a couple of hours now and still can not get anyone who can
tell me. If they did not have a monopoly there is no way I would buy
their product with such lousy support. I just got support and they
said I need to clean my master boot record. If anyone has any ideas
for me, please tell me.
Thank You
Richard
If Disk Manager is an overlay program to provide support for large
drives due to your BIOS not supporting INT13 extensions then you may
have not needed it. If your BIOS provides INT13 extensions (most do in
the last 4 years) then the overlay program was not needed. It replaces
the bootstrap program in your MBR (master boot record, which is sector 0
on the first physical hard drive scanned by the BIOS and is not part of
any partition). The replaces the standard bootstrap program ("standard"
is a bit of a misnomer since the bootstrap program has been different
and gotten slightly larger from DOS to Windows 95 to Windows NT/2K, but
it basically performs the same "standard" function of loading the boot
sector from the primary partition marked as active in the MBR's
partition table).
If you don't need the overlay manager, you need to replace the bootstrap
program in the MBR. For Windows XP, boot into Recovery Console mode and
use FIXMBR (see
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=307654 although you
don't really have to install it but can instead boot from the Windows
install CD and select the first "Repair" option). I believe an older
alternate was to boot using a DOS-bootable floppy (you can get images
for them from
www.bootdisk.com) and use "FDISK /MBR". This overwrites
the first 460 bytes of the MBR (which is the bootstrap area) with the
"standard" bootstrap program.
By the way, DriveImage 5.0 is too old to handle NTFS5 (which became
available since Service Pack 6 for Windows NT 4.0). Then you mention
DriveImage 7.0. So which one do you actually have? I don't know if
DI5.0 will handle drives over 137GB big, and you'll probably need DI6.0
(also called DI 2002) at a minimum.
Since disk images are really partition images, and since the partition
table in the MBR is unaffected whether you use the standard bootstrap
program or an overlay manager, I don't know why DI would not let you
save an image. But then you didn't mention what error you got when
attempting to save an image file set. You obviously cannot save the
image files on the same drive that you are trying to image, so the
problem might be with whatever media to which you were saving the
file(s) for the drive image. I am also surprised that Symantec (who, as
the software predator they are, bought Powerquest) wouldn't tell you how
to "clean the master boot record." You sure you didn't make it sound
like you knew what that was and prematurely ended the tech call? I also
have to wonder if you didn't follow the instructions for the overlay
program. Those that I remember using would first perform a check to see
if they were really needed, and would NOT install if your BIOS already
supported large drives, but then I haven't needed an overlay manager for
about 4 years. If the overlay manager install program actually did
install itself into the MBR then I would suspect you really do need it
(i.e., your computer's motherboard is too old and the BIOS won't support
large drives), but you never mentioned what happened or what errored
when you tried using DriveImage.
