Installation of the Western Digital's EZ Drive, on a 3

Disk Manager is a discontinued software (that was a popular 1980s and 1990s) and documentation package for

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few oper ...

and PC DOS computers, useful for self-installing personal computer

hard disk A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with mag ...

s. It was written by Ontrack, a company that is now part of KLDiscovery. Installation covered different aspects: * explaining

personal computer hardware Computer hardware includes the physical parts of a computer, such as the case, central processing unit (CPU), random access memory (RAM), monitor, mouse, keyboard, computer data storage, graphics card, sound card, speakers and motherboard. ...

concepts * documenting switches of many of the existing disks * putting into place custom

device driver In computing, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabling operating systems and o ...

s which circumvented BIOS limitations, notably those related to maximum disk or partition size and

logical block addressing Logical block addressing (LBA) is a common scheme used for specifying the location of blocks of data stored on computer storage devices, generally secondary storage systems such as hard disk drives. LBA is a particularly simple linear addressi ...

* providing testing and informational utilities Drivers could be either DOS-type, or replacement

master boot record A master boot record (MBR) is a special type of boot sector at the very beginning of partitioned computer mass storage devices like fixed disks or removable drives intended for use with IBM PC-compatible systems and beyond. The concept of MB ...

code. Diskettes with Disk Manager were provided by some disk manufacturers (e.g. IBM), in custom OEM versions, supporting all of their models. Not long after launching in 1985, Ontrack also started providing computer disk data recovery services as ''Ontrack Data Recovery''.

Version history

Version 5.0 for Windows was released on 2004-06-23. It includes DOS versions of Ontrack Disk Manager and Ontrack Data Recovery.

Competing products

Other products that, like ''Disk Manager'' from ''OnTrack Computer Systems'', perform hard drive geometry translation to circumvent BIOS limitations:Microsoft Knowledge Base
Windows Support for Large IDE Hard Disks
/ref> * ''SpeedStor'' from ''Storage Dimensions'' * ''

EZ-Drive Logical block addressing (LBA) is a common scheme used for specifying the location of blocks of data stored on computer storage devices, generally secondary storage systems such as hard disk drives. LBA is a particularly simple linear address ...

'' from ''Micro House'' (also distributed by Western Digital)

References

External links

Ontrack Data Recovery
Utilities for Windows Utility software {{Windows-software-stub