TiVo Community Forums Archives - I think we can add Seagate to the "locked" drive list

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I think we can add Seagate to the "locked" drive list
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Posted by: Trent Bates

Hi all,
I have a Seagate 80GB drive that I blessed 1.5 years ago and put in my DSR6000. I did nothing else to this drive. It did show as an 80GB drive at the time of install and it has sat in my DTiVo until I recently copied the contents of both the factory drive and this one to a new 160GB drive.

Today I get ready to use it for something else and find that the BIOS thinks it's only a 10MB drive. [EDIT] 10GB [/EDIT]

There is some discussion around here that a TiVo is able to lock a drive. From what I'm seeing, this appears to be true.

Discussion?

Posted by: BKL

Check Hinsdale's Upgrade Guide. He mentions a utility for unlocking drives, called qunlock.exe, but I would assume the q refers to quantum. It may unlock your Seagate. Don't know for sure.

Posted by: Robert S

As this is his second upgrade, I think he'll have heard of qunlock.

AFAIK Seagate drives are not affected by the TiVo's drive locking mechanism, so I assume that this is simply a hardware failure that coincidentally has the same effect as locking.

Posted by: Trent Bates

Hi again Robert,

The wierd thing is, my TiVo boot diskette shows the drive as an 80GB as it should be. Let me double check a moment.....

Okay, according to FDISK, I have 10,781 Mbytes total. TiVo boot disk shows 80,026 MB on the drive. I incorrectly stated that the PC BIOS showed a 10 Mb drive in my above post.

But still, it's odd. I checked the Seagate with the Maxtor Diagnostic disk I made yesterday, (I should try Seagate's version) and after an exhaustive test, it showed that everything was fine.

Since DOS is limited to 4 partitions, could it be possible that FDISK can't see all of the space because there are more than 4 partitions? If I type "MFSINFO /dev/hda [Enter]" I get back "/dev/hda10: Success" on the top line. I'm assuming that indicates that there are at least 10 partitions on there. I don't know why there would be that many on that drive but that's the way I'm reading it. Perhaps the TiVo is adding them? Just a thought. :)

I'm going to double check all my settings again and try another motherboard, etc. But I do find this behaviour to be strange!

Maybe I need to do a low level format. ;)
Isn't there a DD command that cleans the partitions off? I couldn't get PQMAGIC to do anything with it and DEBUG.EXE didn't seem to fix it either.

BKL,
Thanks for the idea. I have heard of QUNLOCK. I even tried it on this drive a while ago but nothing happened. The issue seems to be that certain drives removed from TiVo service are showing a limited capacity. Maybe my case is different, but it sounds a lot like what others ae posting.

Posted by: Trent Bates

Further information:
I was able to restore a 40GB backup (not really 40GB) on to the drive and then I was able to restore it again and expand at the same time.
When it was done, mfsrestore showed that there was 78 hours free on the drive. It added two partitions.
I haven't tested it in a TiVo yet because I've got them all together and in the entertainment center.

I'm leaning towards the 4 partition limit in DOS concept!

Posted by: Robert S

That's a BIOS issue, then. Linux can sometimes identify the drive characteristics itself, whereas DOS can only use what the BIOS gives it.

Posted by: Trent Bates

I agree with you. The BIOS is fairly current. (6 months old or less) I would think that it would be able to deal with this but maybe not. It does see the proper sizes for other larger drives. I've got a different model Seagate 80GB drive that it sees all of.

What I find odd is that this drive showed up fine on my older motherboard when I first put it in service (when I blessed it), now it doesn't.

I will poke around in my BIOS'es more. The newest one doesn't give me many options to work with.