Disk Manager
Disk Manager is a discontinued software (that was a popular 1980s and 1990s) and documentation package for MS-DOS and PC DOS computers, useful for self-installing personal computer hard disks. It was written by Ontrack, a company that is now part of KLDiscovery.
Installation covered different aspects:
- explaining personal computer hardware concepts
- documenting switches of many of the existing disks
- putting into place custom device drivers which circumvented BIOS limitations, notably those related to maximum disk or partition size and logical block addressing
- 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.
01Version history
Version 5.0 for Windows was released on 2004-06-23. It includes DOS versions of Ontrack Disk Manager and Ontrack Data Recovery.
02Competing products
Other products that, like Disk Manager from OnTrack Computer Systems, perform hard drive geometry translation to circumvent BIOS limitations:
- SpeedStor from Storage Dimensions
- EZ-Drive from Micro House (also distributed by Western Digital)
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Disk Manager”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Installation of the Western Digital's EZ Drive, on a 3.5-inch floppy disk.jpg by Dsimic, CC BY-SA 3.0
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