OT: how to remove dynam. drive overlay (maxblast) from HDD....

[ryan roopnarine]

its moving week here in kollege town, and as a result, i've managed to net two perfectly fine (300mhz and 550 mhz with trifiling problems) PCs from the "display" area next to the dumpster (also got a REALLLYYY nice monitor that accompanied the 500) at my apartment. i had a 30 gb hard drive that i had on a p133 motherboard (running a 233 chip), that obviously needed the maxtor overlay to work on aforementioned motherboard. i previously installed w98 and w2k on it. when i put it in, it will get to the point where it asks me which op sys i'd like to start, at which point in w2k it will show the splash screen for about 30 secs, and then say something to the effect of "error reading I/O device" . it will act similarly in w98. I tried manually typing in the heads/cylinders into the bios, which let it run for a little bit longer before it halts. i tried using the latest maxtor software to try to take the overlay off, but there's no option in it for doing that. any suggestions? tia.

[632 Regal]

cant you try westerns HD software? It has an option to write zeros to the drive and you start with a brand new blank unformatted drive, might be what you need to clean the sectors up.

[MBXB]

Great dumpster diving, Ryan!
Reformat the hard drive and start clean. You'll have to reinstall Windows.

[rickm]

fdisk /mbr then run delpart.exe on it. WD has their wddiag software (self booting floppy) that will allow you to check the drive for bad sectors and (maybe) mark them as such.

you can hang around my dumpster, I have 49 monitors, 35 PCs and 22 printers that I need to dispose of before Tuesday morning. :P

[632 Regal]

fdisk /mbr then run delpart.exe on it. WD has their wddiag software (self booting floppy) that will allow you to check the drive for bad sectors and (maybe) mark them as such.

you can hang around my dumpster, I have 49 monitors, 35 PCs and 22 printers that I need to dispose of before Tuesday morning. :P

[rickm]

Can't. Nothing the State owns can be ebay'd. I'm about to go in and inventory each item then submit the list for state surplus. That will buy me some time. :) The fun part was running the 10x wipe on each hard drive to make sure they contain no data. B-o-r-i-n-g. Then I get to do this at 2 other facilities.

[ryan roopnarine]

you can hang around my dumpster, I have 49 monitors, 35 PCs and 22 printers that I need to dispose of before Tuesday morning. :P


i will do what you ask...i need a clean 8 ounce glass, and some milk, and i'll make them all disappear :D

1.. it wasn't "dumpster diving" i only get things 266 mhz and above. there's so much good stuff thrown away here at move out time, that some hatians with an old f250 come by every sunday afternoon (this month) and look for mattresses and furniture that has been retroactively thrown away (when they change the style of the apartment furnishings). everything i've ever gotten from over there has somehow ended up in the hands of one of my friends (ie, their monitor dies, stereo, vcr, et cetera)...they like to talk crap about me doing it, but they aren't reluctant to accept it from me when they need it. in this case, i could see across the parking lot that a very expensive monitor was sitting beside the dumpster (put there so someone would take it away without having to muck about in the trash). the 550 computer went along with it. all i had to do was unplug a bum seagate 20 gb hdd from it, and put in a old power supply i had laying around, and it functioned perfectly. the 333 mhz pentium II is going into my mom's computer (its 300 right now, dell mobo only goes up to 333), and i'll throw the rest of it away.

2. i wanted to keep the data on it, i might just stick a 4 gb unit on there with w2k and use it to explore the 30 gb one until i make sure that all of my important stuff is off of it. i was hoping that maxtor had a way to take off the overlay without format, i guess that isn't to be.

[DanDombrowski]

Im not really sure what you're doing, because I didn't read the whole post, but if you still need help when I get up to skool, let me know, I've got all kinds of utlities for HDDs. I desperately need some new hard drives and memory from trash PCs to put together these old shells of computers I have sitting in my office and put them to some use.



its moving week here in kollege town, and as a result, i've managed to net two perfectly fine (300mhz and 550 mhz with trifiling problems) PCs from the "display" area next to the dumpster (also got a REALLLYYY nice monitor that accompanied the 500) at my apartment. i had a 30 gb hard drive that i had on a p133 motherboard (running a 233 chip), that obviously needed the maxtor overlay to work on aforementioned motherboard. i previously installed w98 and w2k on it. when i put it in, it will get to the point where it asks me which op sys i'd like to start, at which point in w2k it will show the splash screen for about 30 secs, and then say something to the effect of "error reading I/O device" . it will act similarly in w98. I tried manually typing in the heads/cylinders into the bios, which let it run for a little bit longer before it halts. i tried using the latest maxtor software to try to take the overlay off, but there's no option in it for doing that. any suggestions? tia.

[DanDombrowski]

it lets you drop an IDE drive in a USB box and put it on a good system, thatll let you do all kinds of stuff to it

[DanDombrowski]

I have a PII 350 mhz processor that I will trade you for the 300mhz one.
I know this sounds really dumb, but its those wacky bus speeds and I don't feel like typing now. I'll explain tomorrow at work.


i will do what you ask...i need a clean 8 ounce glass, and some milk, and i'll make them all disappear :D

1.. it wasn't "dumpster diving" i only get things 266 mhz and above. there's so much good stuff thrown away here at move out time, that some hatians with an old f250 come by every sunday afternoon (this month) and look for mattresses and furniture that has been retroactively thrown away (when they change the style of the apartment furnishings). everything i've ever gotten from over there has somehow ended up in the hands of one of my friends (ie, their monitor dies, stereo, vcr, et cetera)...they like to talk crap about me doing it, but they aren't reluctant to accept it from me when they need it. in this case, i could see across the parking lot that a very expensive monitor was sitting beside the dumpster (put there so someone would take it away without having to muck about in the trash). the 550 computer went along with it. all i had to do was unplug a bum seagate 20 gb hdd from it, and put in a old power supply i had laying around, and it functioned perfectly. the 333 mhz pentium II is going into my mom's computer (its 300 right now, dell mobo only goes up to 333), and i'll throw the rest of it away.

2. i wanted to keep the data on it, i might just stick a 4 gb unit on there with w2k and use it to explore the 30 gb one until i make sure that all of my important stuff is off of it. i was hoping that maxtor had a way to take off the overlay without format, i guess that isn't to be.

[DanDombrowski]

I don't know how much money you make, but I'd be willing to bet that if you compared how much it cost them to have you spend the time to 10x wipe each drive and then make up some of the money selling the used ones, and then compare that with the cost of you hitting the drive with a hammer (to make sure nothing can be recovered) and then buying all new ones, I bet it would be pretty close. Ahh, beurocracy.



Can't. Nothing the State owns can be ebay'd. I'm about to go in and inventory each item then submit the list for state surplus. That will buy me some time. :) The fun part was running the 10x wipe on each hard drive to make sure they contain no data. B-o-r-i-n-g. Then I get to do this at 2 other facilities.

[rickm]

It's not too hard. Stack 'em 5 high, insert the boot disks for the wipe, type one accept command, move the monitor up one machine. Even if I toss the HD I have to wipe them before physically destroying the drives. If any machine leaves one of my facilities with data on it I'm gone. :P Normally I'd hire some kid from the community college to do these and pay he/she 15.00/hr but that eats up what I can get paid extra for (wiping is mindless, takes 5 minutes to get them all going, I check on them 4 hours later). The only person I could dump this on is our programmer who isn't too sharp.

Most of these were purchased between 95 and 97, we have to run either 2000 or XP on all of them, it's easier to buy 100 Dells than it is to buy memory and new drives for these boat anchors and mod them. The resale on them isn't that much but it beats tossing them into the dumpster.