Reformatting pvr drive

[pjphilli]

Hi

I have a couple of 250GB ATA/IDE drives rescued from old Personal Video
Recorders.

Is there any way of reformatting these for use on a PC?
I have tried various ways but just get the message "Sector not found".

Cheers Peter

[bojan]

Did you try to create new partition with suitable software (FDISK for example)?

[pjphilli]

Hi Bojan

Yes I tried a couple of utilities including FDISK for the procedure of first
removing existing partitions, repartition and then format. I have done this
many times previously on IDE drives. But in this case I was always met
with the message "Sector not found".

Seems like there is some special formatting of a PVR drive which resists the
above treatment although it looks like an ordinary IDE drive.

Cheers Peter

[bojan]

Hmmm
That may explain the cause of the problem I had with HD from one receiver (with HD and CD player).
I thought it was faulty so I just throw it away.

[luka]

You could try keeping the existing partitions but changing the partition type and reformatting them? That may work.

Alternatively, if you have linux, you could try zeroing the drive and then recreating partitions. Something like
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdXXXXX bs=16M count=100
(replace the XXXX with the drive letter and remove count=100 if you want to zero the whole drive).

Make sure you don't wipe your main drive!!!

A safe way would be to get a bootable linux CD, disconnect all your other hard drives before booting and then wiping the drive.

[iborg]

Hi

A thought, if the PVR was the type that constantly records to the hard disk, then there is no way I would trust it for further use.

The Tivo's work this way, and you can hear the drive being written to constantly.

If you really want to use it, try something like an ultimate boot CD

One possible link is
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/


I have used some of the tools from this disk.
http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd


Philip.

[cfranks]

It might be worth trying http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-LLF-Low-Level-Format-Tool/ followed by a regular format before you throw the drive away. The free version is a bit slow but the faster version is very cheap.

Charles

[pjphilli]

Thanks All
Plenty of things to try!
Cheers PETER