Unlocking Maxtor drive from a DVR?

[bizzybody]

Picked up a Maxtor QuickView DiamondMax Plus 8 40 gig for $5 from a thrift store. (The place has several of these.) All the computer guy there could tell me about it was it was pulled from a DVR.

Right now I have it connected to a board with nothing but the drive, a floppy drive and a video card. BIOS setup sees it with full capacity. I tried booting with a 98SE floppy and FDISK can tell there's a hard drive but gives me "Error Reading Fixed Disk".

I hooked it up as primary slave on an XP system and Disk Management can't do a thing with it, shows it's empty but won't allow partitions to be created. HDD Unlock Wizard's demo claims the drive is not locked. Something must be locked or password protected on it.

What utility will unlock this drive so it can be used normally? Preferably something I can run off a boot floppy or is in a bootable CD image.

[jaclaz]

I would try to check what the Maxtor utilities have to say first thing, it could well be a dead drive, after all.

You can find them (together with a bunch of HD tools) in UBCD:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Then I would try the unlocking tool for oldish TiVo's:

http://www.weaknees.com/maxtor_powermax.php

Please do understand that the "locking mechanism" may not be the same for all DVR's, so unlocking it may work or fail, even if the drive is functional.

jaclaz

[submix8c]

Pulled from a DVR - special formats contained (sometimes mini-Linux OS). I picked up a rather large one myself (WD2500JB) at a thrift store. May have an altered "partition type" marker...

Do as jaclaz says - get Maxtor Utilities, test the integrity, and then completely "wipe" the HDD (back to "factory"). It will take a while. From there, you should be good. (I had to do the same thing on this WDC 250gb.)