Using a TIVO drive in my windows PC???

  • Thread starter Thread starter mike
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mike

Old TIVO's are dirt cheap and have 40-120GB IDE drives.

I put them in my PC and boot the live GPARTED CD
to create and format two NTFS partitions.
I've used this procedure successfully on many commercial
(non-TIVO) drives.

On some TIVO drives, windows XP won't install, but linux
partitions, installs and runs fine.

On others, windows XP seems to install and run normally, but
there are weird symptoms.

Chkdsk /F d: locks up the chkdsk process and I can't kill it.
Have to reboot.
Chkdsk /F c: gives the familiar "do you want to do
this at the next reboot?"
Chkdsk d: works normally.
Safe mode chkdsk /F d: works fine.

Acronis 11 backup loaded on the system locks up when I
try to run it. It's "checking the partitions..."
But when booted from the live Acronis rescue CD, it runs
fine and the backups restore correctly.

I can't identify any jumper issues.

Hooking up as a second drive and repartitioning/formatting
under windows produces the same result. Letting the XP
install repartition/reformat the drive produces the same
result.

I've run several different disk check programs and found
no bad sectors or other anomalies. I've tried everything
that looks related on the Hirens Boot CD...but I really
don't know what I'm doing.

This isn't random corruption. I've got several 80GB TIVO drives
from different vendors that behave identically and repeatably.

There's something about these TIVO drives that confuses
windows. I have a bunch of these drives.
I'd like to use 'em if I can.

Is there some configuration memory that can be rewritten?
Maybe they have different firmware from the standard versions?

Suggestions on what might be different and how to fix it?

Thanks, mike
 
Do the drives show who manufactured them?
Click to expand...

Maxtor Diamond Max 16 120GB ATA/133HDD
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 40GB QUICKVIEW
Western Digital WD800 80GB Caviar in several variant model suffixes
Hitachi Deskstar 80GB IC35L090AVV207-0
All were removed from TIVO's.
From what you've posted, the common denominator seems to be that you
only see problems when booting from the drives. A guess is that the
drives have MBR loader code (aka boot manager/drive overlay software)
installed that is modifying BIOS disk interrupt code.
Click to expand...

I've used linux GPARTED to reinstall the boot sector and MBR.
Tried windows fixmbr and fixboot.
Tried zeroing out the front end of the drive with dd.
Tried several partitioning programs from the Hiren's Boot cd.
At least one powered up in sleep mode and wouldn't run at all
in a PC. HDAT2 fixed that.
If that's the case you would need to wipe the first sector and start
over, or install "standard MBR code" in the sector. The fact that
Acronis sees the tables, when booted from CD says that the tables are
not being relocated.
Click to expand...
I understand, but when running windows, I can read/write both partitions
with no problems. It's only the programs that access the drive more
directly
that have the problem. If windows can run without incident, why does
chkdsk /F d: lock up, but plain old chkdsk d: works fine???? Don't they
use the same
method to access the drive? Isn't the primary
difference between the two write access? Chkdsk /F d: doesn't even get to
the point where it wants to close all handles. Just locks up.
 
On the Maxtor Quickview;

http://www.seagate.com/files/static...ation/manuals/quickview_40_product_manual.pdf


Under "2.3 Hardware Requirements", it states that the drive is IBM PC AT
compatible. Looking through the doc it doesn't look like there's
anything special about that particular drive.
Click to expand...

Assuming it doesn't have proprietary firmware for TIVO.
There are lots of numbers written on the drive label. Have no
way of telling what they mean.
Booted from the live CD? yes

Booting from a device other than the drive you're trying to clear?
yes



Check the SMART data on the drives. They're fairly old after all. What's
their history? Could these be TIVO boxes that were put out of service
because of failure?
Click to expand...
Yep, I've seen TIVOs with bad drives.
Smart data looks good.
I've done a sector by sector scan with various utilities.
I've got several drives with the exact same symptoms. The commonality
is that they were all removed from TIVO's.
Acronis is a backup disk imaging program that tries to operate on the
drive at a lower level than user-space apps...as is chkdsk.
fromThe plot thickens.
My test machine is a Dell 4600. I put one of the tivo drives internally
on Secondary Master.
I put the second tivo drive as primary slave in a plug-in removable
drive socket with the cdrom on primary master.

I can boot from either drive or the CD using the BIOS boot manager.

Now, chkdsk /F gives the expected result on all partitions no matter how
many drives
are plugged in or which is booted.

The only difference is that I swapped the connectors reversing
the master/slave relationship of the hard drive and the CDROM.

I guess, if it quits being broke, quit trying to fix it.
Thanks, mike
 
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