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Dealing with Locked Drives on the Mac

Has anyone made any progress on dealing with locked original drives on the Macintosh?

I was hoping to join the happy group of Mac users who have sucessfully used their Mac to backup and bless drives for their TiVo.

Unfortunately, I ran into the big stumbling block: my Sony SA's original drive was locked. I was forced to do my backup on a PC (damned humiliating, if you ask me). It's backing up using Dylan's boot disk as I write this.

This prompts me to ask:

Anyone come up with a locked disk workaround for the Mac?

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Did you try powering the drive up with the tivo so it unlocks, then while powered up disconnecting the ide cable and connecting it to the mac.. I did this with my PC as I was too lazy to find the right program to unlock the drive and had no problems


Rick

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Hmmm.... An Interesting solution.

A few questions:

Did you keep it powered up by the TiVo? (ie. Power connector from the TiVo, ide connector from the PC) Or could you just disconnect and remove the drive from the TiVo, having it remain unlocked?

It doesn't do anything bad to either drive or the TiVo to have it disconnected so abruptly, does it?

Didn't electrocute yourself, did ya'?

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Registered: Feb 2000
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quote:

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Originally posted by jcoltrane:
Did you keep it powered up by the TiVo?

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Thanks for the info.

Probably not a method to recommend to beginners, but an option nonetheless

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Just thought I'd bump this up. Don't know if anyone here has come up with any ideas, but this is still the main stumbling block in Mac backups.

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

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Registered: Aug 2000
Location: Lincoln, NE
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The easiest method when you only have a Mac without Linux and a TiVo is to perform the backup on the TiVo hardware. Let the TiVo unlock the drive, kill MyWorld, and do a dd backup from /dev/hda to /dev/hdb. Then you'll have the unlocked data on an unlocked drive and do what you want with it on the Mac.

shondss and tclondss no longer work under 2.0.1 though.

I've done similar things booting off one TiVo bride and have another bride as slave so I could copy files from one to the other (/devbin).

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I sucessfully backed up my locked A drive with only my Mac (G4). I pulled out my DVD and Zip drives and placed the A drive in that bay. With everything turned off, I connected my drive to the TiVo using an extra long IDE cable (from 9th Tee) and connected the power from the Mac. I turned on the Mac first (to supply power to the drive), and then turned on the TiVo. After about 30 seconds, I disconnected the IDE cable from the drive and connected the one that was internal to my Mac, rebooted the Mac (to see the drive), and viola!

As for the backup software, I used the same procedure (roughly) that the Linux people do but through Mac OS X Public Beta. I believe one could also do it with FWB Tooklit 4.0 on OS 8/9.x, but I didn't try that (I had some bad sectors at the very end of the drive). Either way, this will allow you to save the backup to CD or edit the boot parameters.

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Well, I hoped my first post would be a success story, but as it is my backup-via-Mac is temporarily on hold due to a locked drive. My Tivo is a 2-week-old Ubid refurb HDR112, now upgraded to v2.0.1. I've got a Quantum drive ready serve as backup.

I'm not planning on doing the cable swap, so I'm interested in the procedure for backing up using the TIVO hardware (which HTH refers to above).

Questions:

1. To backup using the Tivo, do I need to access the Tivo diagnostic mode (FAQ section 4.3)?

2. Can I access the diagnostic mode from a Mac? (I do not have access to any other computer.)

3. Then there's the password question--what to do if the password isn't "factory" and you're already at 2.0.1. At the rate I'm going, I'm expecting the worst here.

Ugh. Stop me before I move ahead without making a backup!

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: NV, USA
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Has anybody figured out what the unlocking key is? Its a sequence of 512 bytes that the Tivo must have stored somewhere in its prom. Or if anybody knows what the master password westerndigital is using to unlock the drives that would work.

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Registered: Dec 2000
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You'll need to run some kind of ATA commands sniffer/logger under DOS to see what it is that dlgchk.exe does that unlocks the drive. Unfortunately I don't know of one, but someone with some experience in DOS programming may throw one together, I guess.

PS: I heard of some utility called softice, but I have no idea if it's suitable.

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Confucius say: He who play in root, eventually kill tree (as seen on usenet).

[This message has been edited by kazymyr (edited 05-28-2001).]

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: NV, USA
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It looks exactly like what is needed. Now we just need someone skilled in using it who has access to a locked drive and a PC. I have none of those, any volunteers?

If we do get the key does anybody know how to send ATA commands to a drive under linux/unix? I got a feeling it would require a kernel modification.

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Registered: Dec 1999
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quote:

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Originally posted by Loki:
Has anybody figured out what the unlocking key is? Its a sequence of 512 bytes that the Tivo must have stored somewhere in its prom. Or if anybody knows what the master password westerndigital is using to unlock the drives that would work.

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Perhaps that's all DLGCHK does, is to probe geometry (bug in the firmware? possibly).

But there does seem to be an actual key sequence utilized, if you take a look at the 1.3.0 kernel source code (in the directory /test in the source file, there's a bunch of source code made to work the the kernel that does the locking/unlocking thing).

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Registered: Dec 2000
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I don't have a locked drive, in fact, I've never seen one (only read about them on the board). Otherwise, I might have given it a try. Of course, this would have required installing some sort of DOS, but hey, I've done worse before.

Or maybe not - I bet one could use dosemu as a sandbox.

------------------
Confucius say: He who play in root, eventually kill tree (as seen on usenet).

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Registered: Jun 2000
Location: Troy, NY, USA
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quote:

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Originally posted by jcoltrane:
Has anyone made any progress on dealing with locked original drives on the Macintosh?

I was hoping to join the happy group of Mac users who have sucessfully used their Mac to backup and bless drives for their TiVo.

Unfortunately, I ran into the big stumbling block: my Sony SA's original drive was locked. I was forced to do my backup on a PC (damned humiliating, if you ask me). It's backing up using Dylan's boot disk as I write this.

This prompts me to ask:

Anyone come up with a locked disk workaround for the Mac?

---

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Anyone new to this issue might also want to check out this thread:

http://www.avsforum.com/ubbtivo/Forum6/HTML/005297.html

...and, who knows, maybe even develop a GUI for Mac users with this issue. I know at least one person who would be ecstatic! (But I'm sure I'm not the only one.)

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