Hard Drives using OnTrack Disk Manager

Last Updated: 29th December, 1994

Symptoms

OS/2 installation is unable to access drive, is unable to set one or more partitions installable, or reports unusual drive partition sizes.

Hardware

Large IDE drive with more than 1024 cylinders (presumably SCSI and ESDI as well) using OnTrack Disk Manager software (a.k.a. "Drive Rocket").

Problem

OnTrack Disk Manager is incompatible with operating systems other than DOS, including OS/2. It uses non-standard partition descriptions which can make the drive appear to be unreadable or uninitialized.

Fix

Back up all partitions on drives which are using OnTrak and remove OnTrack from the drives prior to installing OS/2. Partitions can be created under OS/2 beyond the "FAT Barrier" by using the OS/2 FDISK or FDISKPM programs, and formatting the new partitions to use the OS/2 High Performance File System (HPFS).

Notes

This wil hopefully become less of a problem in the near future. IBM, Western Digital, and OnTrack are currently working on a solution to the Disk Manager-OS/2 incompatibility.

For now, any system with a large IDE drive larger than 1024 cylinders (generally over 500 Mb) set up as one large partition probably has Disk Manager installed, and should check carefully before installing OS/2 Wapr Version 3 (or any version of OS/2).

Specific tips on removing Disk Manager and re-partitioning would be appreciated.