Ok, a buddy of mine had a PC running Win2k that died a sad death (Power supply died, possibly taking the mobo with it... long story).

Anywho, he has a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 160GB ATA133 drive that lived inside of said PC. Problem was his BIOS didn't support drives as large as 160GB, so there was this utility call "EZDrive" that faked the computer out using some voodoo magic.

Anyway, I was going to try and pull important data off the drive (to burn to CD/DVD) by mounting it with the kernel's ntfs read-only support, as I have done for others in the past. My problem is that some of this voodoo EZDrive stuff has rendered the drive useless to me. I cannot mount any of the three partitions on it. The only way I found out about the EZDrive deal was by running Partition Magic (off the boot CD) on it. It warned me that EZDrive was not installed correctly or some such and to re-install before running PQMagic again.

My deal is this: I'd like to help a brother out, but I'm not going so far as to install some EZDrive mumbo jumbo that could potentially mess my (very standard) stuff up.

Is there some kind of way to get around having to install EZDrive? Would installing EZDrive really mess my stuff up as I suspect (and if you know how it works, please explain)? Thanks.

If you have access to a win2000 or winxp box, slave the drive to that and see if you can read it. Drive overlay programs like EZDrive are designed for windows to get around the joint limitations of windows and the bios. Anything you do inside of linux risks losing the data. Personally, I hate drive overlay programs. There unecessary in linux and a real software kludge in windows that frequently cause problems. EZDrive is already installed on the mbr of that drive; don't compound the error by installing it on your hard drive's mbr. It will mess things up nfor sure.