Harman Patil (Editor)

Disk Manager

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Disk Manager

Disk Manager was a popular 1980s and 1990s software 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 later acquired by Kroll Inc.

Contents

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.

    In recent years Kroll switched to the business of providing computer disk data recovery services as Kroll 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:

  • SpeedStor from Storage Dimensions
  • EZ-Drive from Micro House (also distributed by Western Digital)

    • References

    Disk Manager Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA