TiVo Community Forums Archives - Locked drive on 120 gig maxtor

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Locked drive on 120 gig maxtor
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Posted by: mayesk

I am having trouble with locked drive on a maxtor 120 gig dirve. I did get it unlocked and did a DD to copy from origional drive to the new 120 gig drive. expanded it ok and now want to put it vack into pc to do a backup but I can not unlock it. Using qunlock 0 or 1 depending on if it is in primary master or salve as I have my bootable CD in the secondary IDE 2 and 3. Is there any issues useing the primary????? I also tried another new 120 gig drive and I could see all 120 gig. In the process of trying to unlock the 120 gig with tivo data on it the new one got locked. I am powering down after it runs and I can here it hit the drive....... HELP

Posted by: Robert S

Er, TiVo can only lock the original Quantum drive it ships with - and it certainly can't lock a drive that's never been in it!

I suspect a BIOS problem. Have you tried doing Detect Hard Disks in the BIOS configurator?

What size are the 'locked' drives being reported as?

Posted by: mayesk

I have tried having no drive in the bios , I have tried inputing heads and cyl with no help. The bootable CD says it should unlock it? but it does not. Again it reports as a 10 gig

Posted by: mayesk

how and where do i get the bios config?

Posted by: Robert S

10 Gig is a BIOS problem. Locked drives report about 10 Meg.

The BIOS configurator is accessed by pressing Del at boot (it sounds like you've been in there a lot). You should be using Auto with LBA enabled.

Posted by: mayesk

sorry it was 10 meg
it shows
hdc:Maxtor 6Y120L0, ATA DISK drive
hdc: 20000 sectors (10 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=19/16/63,UDMA(66)

I have auto set and LBA is inabled. I booted to dos floppy and ran the qunlock 2 It says it was sent. I here it hit the drive. It says power cycle the machine.

I power cycle it down remove both power and connector (just to be save)

bring it back up with the bootable cd mfstools-2.0 and it still shows the above.........

I have no clue....... any help.

At first I had the new 120 tvio drive on the primary ide. I have changed it to the secondary and have the cd on the primary ide because I read that byte swaping (or something) does not work on the primary master. But it still does not see all of the drive

Posted by: estrom

I had the exact same problem. I bought 2 identical 120 Gig Maxtor HDs. Strangely, I was able to unlock one of them. The other would not unlock no matter what. I tried moving from secondary IDE to primary IDE (with appropriate changes to qunlock number). I changed from Master to Slave on each of the IDE channels (again, with appropriate changes to qunlock number). I tried removing all other drives from the system. I tried sending the qunlock code many many, times - after each of these attempts I powered down the system and brought it back up. All to no avail.

I returned the drive for another (identical) drive, thinking that since I was able to successfully unlock one drive, the second drive must have something wrong with it. I went through the whole shebang again with the second drive - no dice. I returned it (thank god I didn't go mail-order) for a Western Digital 120 Gig drive (which, BTW, has an 8 MB cache (!!) vs. the 2 MB cache on the Maxtor; all for less money (at Fry's) with a $30 mail-in rebate) and the problem is gone (of course, since I think only Quantum/Maxtor drives have this lock "feature").

I don't think the problem is Bios. I tried every different setting I could (Auto/manual/LBA, etc.) and was never able to get past the 9 MB thing. Also, how could it be Bios if I was able to successfully unlock one of the drives?

This really is a mystery. I wonder if Quantum has changed something in their newer lots of the drives which makes qunlock not work. *shrug* Of course, I don't understand why this step is needed strictly for Quantum/Maxtor drives in the first place.

-E

Posted by: deeremj

I Am having the same problem with Maxtor 6y160p0 drive (160 gb, 8mb cache, 7200 rpm diamondmax 9 drive).

I did a mfstools restore to this drive 6 weeks ago, no problem - the drive showed up as 137 gb, and worked fine in my tivo.

A few days ago I re-plugged into my PC (same exact pc, same controller, same EVERYTHING) and no matter what I do, comes up as 10 MB...I wanted to copy the drive via dd to a refurb 160gb 5400 rpm drive I just got back (finally) from maxtor, and use the 'faster' drive in a pc...NO DICE...

I basically gave up, but would really like to get to bottom of this, as it is likely going to affect more users in near future.

Perhaps someone who can explain what makes a drive locked and how qunlock works will help shed some light on the situation.

Thanks - MJ

Posted by: bob61

I am experiencing the same problem. I have a 120GB Maxtor that I upgraded previouslly. I want to add another 120GB drive to the unit. I've been trying QUNLOCK over and over and it won't get off the 10MB setting.

I've tried it as SLAVE, MASTER, CABLE SELECT, single drive, with other DOS/Windows drive, nothing works. I've done this before so I understand how QUNLOCK is supposed to work.

There has to be someone to get this drive unlocked (I don't care about the contents, I have the image backup to restore from). With all the guru's here someone must have the answer.

HELP???!!???

:confused:

PS - dangdest thing... this is exactly same model number mentioned above. Something quirky about this particular model?

Posted by: cnshough

I had the same problem a few days ago. I took it back to Office Depot, got another one just like it, and all was fine. I would suggest doing the same.

Posted by: Robert S

bob61 - this is definitely not the usual drive locking, although it has a similar effect. For a start qunlock will unlock a TiVo-locked drive very painlessly.

Some people have seen this happen on drives that have never been in a TiVo, which is also strange.

Posted by: Builder0030

Keep in mind the jumper configuration diagram in the Maxtor manual is very confusing. The dotted line jumper showing the slave configuration on style B and C is actually the capacity limitation jumper.I kept thinking a jumper was required for the drive set up as slave...its not. No jumper for slave and place the jumper closest to the single pin for master. If you have a jumper on the third set of pins from the single pin, the drive will appear locked at 10 gig. I didn't figure out the correct configuration until after I returned my first 120 gig maxtor, so I don't know if the drive was actually locked or just showing 10 gig with the jumper on the incorrect pins. Perhaps I was the only one that made this mistake as it was late and I was real tired, but I figured I'll share my screw-up with everyone, hopeing it will help.

Posted by: Robert S

Locked drives report 10 megabytes, the capacity limiter will make it report 10 gigabytes.

Posted by: gunrunnerjohn

You should note that, depending on the age of your BIOS, there have been limits on recognition of capacity at 8gigs, 32gigs, and now 128gigs. If your BIOS is about three years or more old, you may be limited to 32gigs, or possibly even 8gigs.

Posted by: wyro

I too have the same problem. There has to be a better work around than to return the drive. That seems like a lousy solution.

Posted by: deeremj

I agree, returning the drive is no solution - particularly since my drive worked fine in my pc at 137 MB when I upgraded it, but 6 weeks later when I attempted to dd to another drive in exact same pc it came ups as 10 MB.

Posted by: tyagi

I am currently experiencing this problem with the same model 120GB Maxtor drives as the thread originator.

I have 2 120GB Maxtor drives, one became locked when I put it in the TiVo. QUNLOCk will not unlock it. The other drive, which has never been in the TiVo has also become locked at 10MB! This is very bizarre.

I have tried all combinations of QUNLOCk, Master, Slave, Primary, Secondary, to no avail. It seems that Maxtor must have done something with the firmware in recent models.

It looks like I will have to return the drives to the shop and try to explain this one!

Posted by: brett63

I had a similar problem with a Maxtor DiamondMax 120 GB drive I purchased a week ago. First of all, from my personal experience, I can tell you that any Maxtor/Quantum drive can become locked, not just the factory one shipped with the TiVo.

After performing a dd image, I installed the new drive into my TiVo to test it out. Everything worked fine. When I reconnected it to my machine to finish the procedure, it was showing up as 9 MB! I tried running Qunlock and power cycled my PC. When it restarted, I went into the BIOS menu and auto-detected the IDE drives, and it was still showing up as 9 MB!

Then I re-read the Hinsdale HowTo and realized what I was doing wrong. Instead of setting up the HD specs, I set it to Auto, saved and rebooted.

Sure enough, my BIOS detected the HD model code and used the factory spec settings. Boot disk Linux correctly reported it as 120 GB.

I have no idea if this is relevant to your own experiences, but I haven't heard it mentioned yet.

Posted by: buddhawood

My brother and I spent 3 days this weekend trying to find some way to get my 2 brand new never installed 120gb Maxtors to read more than 9mb. We gave up went and exchanged them and I know have a 304 hour TIVO

Posted by: iambic

For those who have a "locked" Diamond Series 9 drive that's not brand new and has been locked by the TiVo then please see my post here...

URL]http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=880861#post880861[/URL]

The boot CD wouldn't unlock the drive so I burnt a downloaded copy of qunlock to a Windows boot CD and booted up in DOS and performed the qunlock from there, cycled the power and the drive was then unlocked.

This doesn't however sound if it's of any use to those whose brand new drives seem to be locked, but it may help some of those posting in this thread.

Posted by: remster

I battled with my 120gb maxtor for 3 hours after I tested it in the tivo and it got locked in my tivo.
I didn't connect the dots right away, although I had heard about locked drives.

Try runnings qunlock on all the 4 numbers:

qunlock 0
qunlock 1
qunlock 2
qunlock 3

I've seen my drive show up as a shadow drive, both on master and slave, while only one drive was plugged in... so maybe the bios or something is confused as to where the drive is exactly... so by unlocking every slot, you got a better chance to hit it.

I also played around with the maxtor maxblast and maxblast II utilities to let these utilities install the drive. Not sure if that helped the drive but I mention this for completeness.

For one hour my mistake was to think primary master was qunlock 1... no it's qunlock 0 ... 0-based array.

Posted by: pfl2000

Does anybody actually know what qunlock does? I ran it on my Maxtor 120GB (model 6Y120L) this weekend and since then have only had it show up as 10MB and it no longer works in my Tivo.
The only reason I ran it was after my Tivo upgraded to to 3.1 all my hacks were gone and I was having trouble mounting the Tivo drive to restore them. So in a last ditch attempt I thought I'll run qunlock, what damage could it do.

Seems like the answer is A LOT of damage!!!!

Anybody know who the author of qunlock is? I thought it was Maxtor, but after speaking to them on the phone and checking their web site it seems that they aren't. I can't find any source code for it, and don't really know what it does. I do know that my big old drive is now an expensive paperweight and I've been without Tivo and my Satellite for the entire weekend (glad the Sopranos are done). I may have to resort to buying yet another drive while I sent this one back to be replaced.

By the way I ran setmax (which reads/writes to the firmware) from my Linux box, it says that drive is reporting 9MB, but if I try to use it to change the firmware to 120MB it fails.
Anybody know much about Maxtor drives firmware?

Posted by: remster

Q in qunlock is for quantum, but I read that some maxtor drives come with quantum firmware...

Posted by: eric_mcgovern

Add me to the list. Just picked up a Maxtor 120 GIG followed hinsdale instructions, and the Maxtor drive only shows up as a 10 MB drive. I tried running MaxBlast, and it tells me there are no valid maxtor drives.

Guess I will have to take the drive back...