EZ-drive

[CalmanR]

I am attempting to restore a pc hard drive as a mirror image of my notebook. I have installed the operating system (win XP)

when I attempt to restore the files from the NOTEBOOK CD it tells me that the hard drive has EZ_drive but it is not running and proceeds to reboot and go into a circular mode.

I cannot find the term 'EZ-drive' on the Microsoft website or any other website for that matter

any idea what 'ez-drive' is or how I get it to run?

Hard drive is an IBM DJNA 20.3 GBBios Award V4.51pg

SYSTEM IS USED AS A STORAGE FACILITY ONLY

[NickS]

EZ-Drive is a Dynamic Disk Overlay (DDO) program which loads from the boot sector of the disk and replaces the BIOS disk handling routines. This means that even if your BIOS is so old that it will only support a 540MB HDD, you can still put a huge drive on your machine - but you have to tell the BIOS that it is smaller than it really is so that it will boot the software. It should not be used with an OS which drives the HDD controller directly, such as Windows XP or Windows 2000.
From Western Digital's website:

For users familiar with our EZ-Drive, WDDiag, WDATA66, and WDTblchk programs, these utilities have been replaced with our new Data Lifeguard Tools software. Data Lifeguard Tools is a software suite that combines all of our EIDE drive installation and management utilities into one easy to use program. The utilities are also available separately.

If you don't boot from the drive, EZ-Drive will not be running. In addition, it will have written misleading partition information in the primary partition table (to allow an old BIOS to boot it) which it would normally replace with its own values at start-up.