Dynamic Drive Overlay software for Western Digital drives
EZ-Drive 9.03W
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This is EZ-Drive version 9.03W and meant for Western Digital drives. However when I tried it out I found it worked fine with Seagate and Compact Flash cards. The video provides a detailed review and tutorial, showing you how you can use EZ-Drive to get around BIOS limitations and create four 2 GB FAT partitions for MS-DOS.
The highlights of this program are the low system requirements, working on machines with only 4 MB RAM and the low memory requirements compared to later versions of Ontrack based DDO software. The negatives are that it doesn't support FAT32, just FAT16 and doesn't add CD-ROM booting capability compared to later versions of Ontrack based DDO software. |
| ezdrive9.exe |
EZ-Drive 9.06W
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Data Lifeguard Tools 11.2
This is DataLifeguard Tools, a version of Ontrack Disk Manager licences to Western Digital. The program will create a Floppy boot disk. I found that this doesn't work on newer machines so you might have to run it on a Windows 9x or XP machine.
Data Lifeguard Tools is very polished and has a nice looking user interface. It is quite a recent product, from around 2004 and the hardware requirements are quite steep, requiring 16 MB of RAM. I ran into an issue with the software not being able to launch the high resolution graphics mode. There is a workaround, just run the executable manually again when you get kicked back to the command prompt.
The highlights of this product are FAT32 support which means you can create large partitions, for example I used a 20 GB Western Digital IDE drive and configured a single 80 GB partition and then installed Windows 98 SE on a 486 Computer.
Another highlight is that it adds the option to boot from CD-ROM. When you boot from C: there is a blue banner. Press space to boot from the floppy or press to C to boot from the CD-ROM. This alone is a very good feature to have.
One negative I discovered is that Data Lifeguard Tools uses quite a lot of memory. Compared to EZ-Tools 9.03W it requires 10 KB more memory.
The program worked on Western Digital drives and Compact Flash cards but refused to work on a Seagate drive.
Data Lifeguard Tools is very polished and has a nice looking user interface. It is quite a recent product, from around 2004 and the hardware requirements are quite steep, requiring 16 MB of RAM. I ran into an issue with the software not being able to launch the high resolution graphics mode. There is a workaround, just run the executable manually again when you get kicked back to the command prompt.
The highlights of this product are FAT32 support which means you can create large partitions, for example I used a 20 GB Western Digital IDE drive and configured a single 80 GB partition and then installed Windows 98 SE on a 486 Computer.
Another highlight is that it adds the option to boot from CD-ROM. When you boot from C: there is a blue banner. Press space to boot from the floppy or press to C to boot from the CD-ROM. This alone is a very good feature to have.
One negative I discovered is that Data Lifeguard Tools uses quite a lot of memory. Compared to EZ-Tools 9.03W it requires 10 KB more memory.
The program worked on Western Digital drives and Compact Flash cards but refused to work on a Seagate drive.
| dlgsetup11_dos.exe |