TiVo Community Forums Archives - Convert TiVo drive to regular drive?

TiVoCommunity.com
(c)opyright 1995-2005 All rights reserved
indexcheckTC
This area is a static history of posts in the TiVo Community Forum Archive.
This archive history was made for the simple indexing of search sites like Google.

Pages:1

Convert TiVo drive to regular drive?
(Click here to view the original thread with full colors/images)

Posted by: LarryInAz

A friend of mine has a couple of 80gb hard drives that were in his Series 1 TiVo laying around that he'd like to use in his computer. [with the price of hard drives he replaced them with 2 120gb drives]
Is there something special he needs to do to format them to use in a Windows pc?

Thanks in advance for any info...

Posted by: Robert S

Nothing special required on the formatting front - just FDISK and FORMAT (or use Drive Manager or PartitionMagic or whatever) as normal.

If the drives appear to be only 10 megabytes in size, use DiskUtil to unlock them.

Posted by: simmike

If you get stuck and can't get rid of the partitions, you can try utilities that write all zeroes to the drive. These are part of the utility boot disks you can get at the manufacturers website. I'm not sure is this is still a problem, I remember battling trying to get rid of Linux partitions with FDISK in the past.

Posted by: LarryInAz

Thanks for the insight - he's not comfortable tinkering with the drives so he'll give them to me tomorrow to "fix".

Posted by: Robert S

TiVoes use a different partition table format than PC's, so you don't get the situation where FDISK sees partitions it can't delete.

FDISK will say that the disk is unpartitioned.