I have an old laptop Harddrive with about 20 Gig which I'm quite keen to read and access any information about Old Projects it may have.

I'm using Testdisk which says I have a single Partition on the Drive (screenshot).

(I've just knocked the drive which seems to have baulked the analysis of the drive, so I'm going to have to reboot.)

Does anyone have experience of the OnTrack Disk Managment DDO Partition?

How can I remove it and mount the Sub partitions? One is a FAT32 W98 partition and the other two are Reiserfs.

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If I go deeper, I can see the partitions within the OnTrack Partition (see screenshot).

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Have not tried this in many years so I do not know if it still works but you can try adding sdc=remap63 as a kernel boot option.

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Large-Disk-HOWTO/

Thanks for the response.

The Laptop I took the hard drive out of has long since died.

I am currently accessing the hard drive through an external USB caddie.

Wonder if it is one of those dynamic overlays?

Indeed it is.

I have tried booting up off the USB caddie, but I get an error saying that the DDO software is missing.

Not sure linux ever fooled with that. Windows only deal I think.

Ok.

Lets try another tack.

I have copied the Disk onto a hard drive using ddrescue.

Given that fdisk reports the sector size as 512 bytes (see attached screenshot), I know that the total size of the DDO partition is 39069063x512=20,003,360,256 bytes.

I also know (from the second screenshot, above) That the first Partition is the FAT32.

I've tried to slice off a section of the disk image:

dd if=OnTrack.img of=Part1-FAT32.img count=15631938 and mount this, but it won't mount.

The Overlay software kicked in before Grub...

First I would use the file command on the ontrack container. It may give the offset to the start of the partitions.

Attach a loop device. Include an offset. Then check the loop device.
If the CHS addresses in your second link are absolute locations on the disk, I think you would use for the first partition,
sudo /sbin/losetup -fs /dev/sdc -o $(16*63*512)
assuming 512 bytes per sector in the fixdisk listing and that the disk contents are linear.

The command will return the lo device used. You can use file -s or mount with the loop device instead. E.g. sudo file -s /dev/loop1

I played with a computer like that back in 97 or so. I think you'd be better off trying to get a physical computer with an old bios and try to image the old system back to a disk where they tried this on. I remember trying linux on that deal too and never could figure out a way to access it. The disk doesn't end up being a normal structure as far as I can recall. Part of the bios and maybe parts of the first part of the disk were used together. As you can see, it didn't say with us for very long cause it sucked. It was real difficult to backup and image.

Keep trying, maybe you'll crack it. I didn't.