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80 GB Drive with Dynamic Overlay DDO - How to Access it?

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ABCOffice

IS-IT--Management
Dec 30, 2005
3
US
An 80 GB Seagate ST380011A drive was installed into an older AMD K-6 computer (intended to replace the computer within 6 months) with Windows 98 SE - this was four 5 months ago. The Dynamic Drive Overlay software was installed at that time and the computer had been functioning fine until last Friday.
The user said the computer blue screened Thursday, but it "recovered" OK (didn't tell me anything), then blue screened Friday, but didn't recover.
The computer now will not boot to the drive - the MBR is perhaps corrupted.
All I need from that drive are four files that were not backed up by the user. I am trying to find a way to access the drive's contents to retrieve them. Installed the drive as a second drive in Windows XP and it sees the drive, but not the files (assume because of the DDO.)
I tried using the Seagate DiscWizard utilities and tried to restore the MBR, but it didn't help.
Does anyone know of a utility that will allow a non-DDO booted computer access the files on a DDO enabled hard drive?

 
You put the DDO software on the boot drive so it loads with the OS. This procedure, however, goes back to the days of DOS and there may be issues with later operating systems that I have fortunately avoided.
DDO access gets the enabled drive access and is not used on any drives that are not enabled.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.
 
Thanks for the reply!
I was hoping that I could locate a utility like NTFS Reader ( that could be used on the DDO drive. I used NTFS Reader last year to copy the files from a hosed Windows XP drive in a laptop to a USB drive.
If the computer was booted using another DDO drive and the failed one was the second DDO drive, could it see the contents of the hosed DDO drive? (Probably a dumb question but I am grabbing at straws...)
 
Normally would expect the system with a DDO boot drive to see other DDO drives without problems provided there were no other issues. But I'm not sure if there are possible version differences.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.
 
Thank you again. If there is a chance that I can recover those files, I'll take the time to try it. I'll post the results of trying the second DDO drive in case anyone else ever has this problem.

 
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