Difficulty getting a large disk mounted

[Robin Laing]

Jeff Vian wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-02-22 at 15:54 +0000, Nigel Wade wrote:
> 
>>mconsidine at netreach.net wrote:
>>The hardware brower recognizes this as
>>
>>>>>>>    Device Start End   Size(MB)  Type
>>>>>>>/dev/hdd
>>>>>>>    /hdd1  1     1460  11453     fat32
>>>>>>>           1     1460  11453     Free space
>>>>>>>    /hdd2  1461  7296  45779     No filesystem
>>>>>>>           7297  7298     10     Free space
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>
>>>Sorry for creating any confusion.
>>>
>>>The drive has data on it that I want to move over to the FC3
>>>system already installed.  The data is in a Windows
>>>filesystem
>>>structure and I don't want to have to put it into another
>>>system, boot it, hook it up to the LAN, etc.  I just want to
>>>get the existing FC3 system to recognize it so that I can
>>>pull
>>>the large files off that I need.  Once that is accomplished,
>>>repartitioning it using and ext2 or ext3 filesystem would be
>>>perfectly fine.
>>>
>>>Imagine the situation as this : you've got a perfectly well-
>>>running FC3 installation.  Now you need more diskspace. 
>>>Someone
>>>hands you a harddisk that had Win98 and it's filestructure
>>>on
>>>it.  The disk was formatted (apparently) using EZ-Drive. 
>>>You
>>>are welcome to reformat the disk, but only after copying a
>>>number of files over to the FC3 installation.
>>>
>>>That's as clear as I can make the situation.
>>>
>>>TIA,
>>>Matt
>>>
>>
>>According to installations instructions I found for EZ-Drive, you cannot use 
>>a EZ-Drive formatted disk with anything but Windows. From the partition 
>>table you showed earlier that would seem to be the case. /dev/hdd1 shows as 
>>FAT32 and may be ok, but the rest of the partition table doesn't make a lot 
>>of sense.
>>
>>What do you get if you run 'fdisk -l /dev/hdd' from a command line?
>>
>>
> 
> Now you are tickling some long buried memories.
> 
> Is EZ-Drive one of the disk compression tool that were popular some
> years ago?   If so, it _will_ only work in Winblows and the only option
> I know of is to put it in a windows machine and use the LAN to move the
> files.
> 
> I have not used those tools since drives of 6GB and larger came
> available, but I know they had the driver for the compression on the
> boot sector so it will work with Winblows, but not on other OSes.
> The actual data was in a compressed file, not written to a filesystem.
> 
> 

This is a good answer.  It isn't really a compression program but a 
translation program to work with larger drives than the bios or OS 
would handle.  I also found that EZ based drives may not work on newer 
motherboards as they are detected properly by the bios.

I now remember this software and found this link that will explain 
that what you say is the only way.

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/translation.html

Instead of spending all this time to get around the problem, put the 
drive in an old computer and transfer the files.

I did see that there was a kernel patch some time ago that would allow 
drives with overlays to work.  Search google for an answer.

-- 
Robin Laing