TiVo Community Forums Archives - How do I remove the Windows XP drive signature?

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How do I remove the Windows XP drive signature?
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Posted by: angrytaxman

I've been walking my friend through the process of upgrading his friends stand alone box. He accidentally didn't format the drive he was using as a "C:" drive and it had a previous installation of Windows XP on it. I now think that he might have digitally signed that drive and it might be inoperable in the Tivo. Now comes the big problem, he doesn't have the cables etc to hook up the Tivo and find out. So is there any way to see what signature is on that drive, and if it is a Windows XP signature to get rid of it?

Thanks

[edit] I think I might not have been clear the first time, he powered up his machine with WinXP on it and had the original Tivo drive plugged in too. Does this mean it's digitall signed? And if it is, can he do anything about it?

Posted by: Pictor Guy

Other than plugging it in and trying I would say just have him remove the XP drive and plug in the new drive and reformat it using a Linux boot disk/CD.

Posted by: Robert S

The XP signature overwrites the boot block, making it unbootable. I don't know of any way to check for this (obviously you could checksum the boot block, but there aren't utils around to do that automatically).

There is a utility called MakeTiVoBootable which will restore the boot block and you could easily use dd to copy the boot block off a working A drive.