DDO conflicts with the new motherboard!

[wengang]

Hi all.

If you're familiar with DDO, please read on.

I had to install a DDO on all my hard drives because the motherboard I bought 6 years ago didn't support large discs, even with the latest (and final) update. It's never been a problem.

But after 6 years of planning, I built a new system this week, Asus P4P800SE motherboard, P4 3.2C cpu. Now the new board does not requre a DDO to read the discs. In fact, it cannot load the DDO.

Well one of my discs is 160 Gb. Another is 80 Gb. Both are Seagate and the DDO is seagate's also. I've tried a couple hundred tricks, but in the end, the mobo won't go past the DDO's bluescreen, where it stops:
ERROR dynamic drive overlay not loaded.

Well, Seagate's website goes on about how easy to use the DDO is. Easy to add, easy to remove. Well, in fact, I booted to Seagate's disc wizard and the option to remove the DDO is greyed out (can't be clicked). So is the option to update the DDO, and the option to upgrade disc wizard. There is really no choice. I suspect the only solution to this is to remove the DDO. But if seagate's own app doesn't do the remove, I could be looking at 160 gb of lost data.

Well, one partition of this 160, besides data, holds my XP OS. I'd like to keep it intact to avoid all the backup/restore/re-installs/downloading service packs, updating virus defs and all the nightmares of starting over. But beyond that, even if I did decide to wipe the disc, I have no fast or easy way to move 160 gb off and start over.

Ultimately, I have to find a way to either make the ASUS mobo run the DDO or a harmless way to remove the DDO.

If you've overcome this before, please share the secret with me (or any good tips). I've left email with Seagate and Asus tech support. Both gave autoresponse and promise to get back within X days. In the meantime, I'm going insane.

Of course, I was able to put the boot drive back in the old system and run it as normal, so I'm not cut off. Just anxious to see the new stuff perform.

Thanks all.

Wengang

[dglienna]

I think that you should try to un-install the DDO while the driver is running on the OLD system. You will not be able to access part of the drive anymore, but you will be able to move it to your new machine to get full access.

I read up on it a bit and found this:

Problems Removing the Driver: Some of these overlays can be very difficult to remove from the disk, and require you to use uninstall facilities that come with the driver, if you want to get rid of them. When you do remove the driver, say because you have upgraded to a PC that supports large drives, you may have to repartition and reformat the disks (though this may not be required).

from:

http://www.storagereview.com/guide20...s/overDDO.html

Something from the HP site:

Removing the DDO may result in data loss and thus the recommendation is to backup up your data while you can and before it is too late.

- Create Startup disk and run.

- At the A: prompt run scandisk and carry out the surface scan of the harddrive.

A:\> scandisk C: /surface

If an error occurs than the you cannot remove DDO without a risk of file error and loss. If no error then you can remove DDO permanently.

you may be able to:

Start the whole process over using an ME startup disk. Use DOS's FDISK\MBR, FDISK and Format apps to prepare your drive instead of letting DDO doing it for you.

if you fix the master boot record, then the drive should work. I would back it up first, though.

[wengang]

Thanks.

I read that same article somewhere, after I did a Google search on this.

I was in contact with the drive maker, Seagate and the ddo maker, onTrack, and they all seemed baffled by the specifics of the problem. It just went from one problem to another to another. Dead ends every direction.

Finally, I bought a box of CDrs and between that and my other HDDs, I got it all backed up. Then I wiped the disc.
That's when the trouble really started. It absolutely wouldn't start back up no matter what. I tried FDISK several times, I tried the partition that XP builds in the auto partitioner on the XP boot CD. I even got desperate and tried the disc wizard again (the one with the DDO) . Nothing worked. It wouldn't consistently hold a partition.

Then finally the BIOS couldn't even recognize or find the disc. So I took the disc back to the shop and they replaced it right away. I felt guilty since it was really not their fault and I had messed with it until it apparently broke internally.

So, I took my brand new disc home and guess what... same problem. I can't get XP to install. It always crashes somewhere along the way to that blue screen full of data and code numbers. Once I got it all the way installed and the pc started restarting itself every minute or so and I knew it hadn't installed properly. So I broke down and took it down to the "Computer Hospital". They tried for a couple hours and declared the motherboard broken.

I'm only a semi-techie myself, more of a programmer, but I love how techies can always blame a certain piece of hardware. What I'm thinking is that the original messing with the DDO diskettes damaged the BIOS, not that the motherboard itself if physically broken. To support that theory, I've noticed that when I boot up, my CDROM shows perfectly as primary slave but when I boot to a win98 floppy, it can't find the CDROM. Also, the hard drive shows up as primary master, but in the Disc Wizard system, it shows up under Unknown Controller. Seems the controllers are having identity crisis.

Well, thanks again. This is unresolved, but a whole different problem than what I posted.