Registered: Jul 2000
Location: Home of the '01 World Series Champions
Posts: 324

Convert TiVo drive to regular drive?

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...

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TiVo 540040 [574 hours]
RCA DVR40 [214 hours]
Hughes SD-DVR40 [243 hours]
Sold 2 Series2 units to pay for HR10-250 * [63 HD hours]

* Original HR10 "born" April 6th arrived April 22nd Died August 25th
Replacement HR10 "born" July 16th arrived September 3rd, re-upgraded 9/6

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Registered: Jul 2002
Location: Cambridgeshire, UK
Posts: 9266

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.

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Please do not PM me asking for TiVo backups. I don't have any.

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Registered: Jun 2004
Location:
Posts: 76

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.

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: Home of the '01 World Series Champions
Posts: 324

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

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Registered: Jul 2002
Location: Cambridgeshire, UK
Posts: 9266

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.

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Please do not PM me asking for TiVo backups. I don't have any.

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