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 ope ...

and

PC DOS PC or pc may refer to: Arts and entertainment * Player character or playable character, a fictional character controlled by a human player, usually in role-playing games or computer games * '' Port Charles'', an American daytime TV soap opera * ...

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 magnet ...

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 computer case, case, central processing unit (CPU), Random-access memory, random access memory (RAM), Computer monitor, monitor, Computer mouse, mouse, Computer keyboard, ...

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 ot ...

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 address ...

* providing testing and informational utilities Drivers could be either DOS-type, or replacement master boot record 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'' from ''Micro House'' (also distributed by Western Digital)

References

External links

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