# Uninstall 2 Zippered drives



## nathan909 (Oct 9, 2003)

I have a HR10-250. I want to uninstall TWO zippered hard drives and use them for my PC or Xbox. What is the correct and easyest way to do this. I can care less about the data on them.

Thanks

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## PortlandPaw (Jan 11, 2004)

Step 1: Remove them from TiVo
Step 2: Install in PC
Step 3: Run fdisk and format them


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## ttodd1 (Nov 6, 2003)

Step 4: Install OS you want.


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## PortlandPaw (Jan 11, 2004)

Oh, yeah, forgot that last step...very important.


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## nathan909 (Oct 9, 2003)

Ok, so the drives are not locked?

Can I just use windows to delete partitions? 

I thought I read somewhere that connecting the drives to a pc could render them useless, if i didnt do something first.

Thanks again.


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## nathan909 (Oct 9, 2003)

I just connected the 2 drives.
I booted to a dos 6.22 prompt.
I ran fdisk.
I viewed fixed drives.

Both drives only read: 7553 Mbytes free.
which is not right.

IDE0 is the oem 250GB drive, with zipper.
IDE1 is a 200GB add on drive

Am I missing something?


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## ForrestB (Apr 8, 2004)

DOS can't format large drives. How about installing an OS that was released in this decade!


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## ciper (Nov 4, 2004)

"Both drives only read: 7553 Mbytes free"
Because they already have data on them and the ~8mb is what is left over after the Tivo partitions. Just blow away the current partition table and you should be good to go.

Dos 6.22 will not allow the creation of partitions larger than 2GB with fat16. So you could create a 40gb drive with 20 two gigabyte partitions


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## PortlandPaw (Jan 11, 2004)

nathan909 said:


> I thought I read somewhere that connecting the drives to a pc could render them useless, if i didnt do something first.


That's a good caution, but it only pertains to re-use in a TiVo. If you boot into XP or W2K (and I assume Vista), it trashes the boot sector and makes the drive unbootable in a TiVo until you run MakeTiVoBootable or reformat the drive.


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## mr.unnatural (Feb 2, 2006)

ttodd1 said:


> Step 4: Install OS you want.


Only required if you plan on making it the boot drive.



PortlandPaw said:


> That's a good caution, but it only pertains to re-use in a TiVo. If you boot into XP or W2K (and I assume Vista), it trashes the boot sector and makes the drive unbootable in a TiVo until you run MakeTiVoBootable or reformat the drive.


That's really only an issue if you allow the Disk Manager to start mucking around with the drive and letting it assign a drive letter to it. Attaching a Tivo drive to your IDE/SATA bus and letting Windows boot into an NTFS filesystem will otherwise have no detrimental effects on the drive.



ciper said:


> "Both drives only read: 7553 Mbytes free"
> Because they already have data on them and the ~8mb is what is left over after the Tivo partitions. Just blow away the current partition table and you should be good to go.
> 
> Dos 6.22 will not allow the creation of partitions larger than 2GB with fat16. So you could create a 40gb drive with 20 two gigabyte partitions


It sounds more like you've set the limiting jumper on the drive or it somehow got locked. I'm not sure DOS will even recognize the drive as having any partitions on it. Linux will recognize FAT partitions but I'm not sure that DOS can see Linux partitions, but I'm not 100% sure.


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## PortlandPaw (Jan 11, 2004)

mr.unnatural said:


> Attaching a Tivo drive to your IDE/SATA bus and letting Windows boot into an NTFS filesystem will otherwise have no detrimental effects on the drive.


I've heard that but never dared to test it!

Have you actually confirmed this to be true? If so, it would relieve a lot of anxiety when I'm playing around.


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## classicsat (Feb 18, 2004)

nathan909 said:


> Ok, so the drives are not locked?
> 
> Can I just use windows to delete partitions?


There are no partitions for Windows to delete. They use a different partition table system, so Windows will not even see the TiVo one, so will think the drive is just blank.

You can use Windows setup tools as if it were a new blank drive.



> I thought I read somewhere that connecting the drives to a pc could render them useless, if i didnt do something first.


It is connecting it to an NT based system and booting, which can hose the TiVo boot sector. It doesn't render the whole drive useless at all. Since you are using the drives for PC drives, it doesn't matter.


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## Markman07 (Jul 18, 2001)

RIP Tivo Drives.

We will miss you.


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## ciper (Nov 4, 2004)

mr.unnatural said:


> It sounds more like you've set the limiting jumper on the drive or it somehow got locked. I'm not sure DOS will even recognize the drive as having any partitions on it. Linux will recognize FAT partitions but I'm not sure that DOS can see Linux partitions, but I'm not 100% sure.


Hmm, I might be remembering wrong but I thought Fdisk would see the Tivo partitions as unknown.

To the original poster please use gparted live http://gparted-livecd.tuxfamily.org/
Or if you insist on dos try http://www.freedos.org/ as it has a free fdisk that I think supports linux partitions.


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## mr.unnatural (Feb 2, 2006)

PortlandPaw said:


> I've heard that but never dared to test it!
> 
> Have you actually confirmed this to be true? If so, it would relieve a lot of anxiety when I'm playing around.


I think I did it by accident once and I've read other reports that support the premise. I left a Tivo drive connected to the IDE bus on my PC and didn't realize it was still there before booting into Win2K. Come to think of it, I believe I have the boot partition formatted as FAT32 on my Windows drive because it's the one I use with my Tivo Linux boot CDs for transferring files and storing backup images. I really don't know if the filesystem on the boot drive has any bearing on the issue but I thought I'd mention it.

I don't believe an NTFS-based OS will write anything to the boot partition unless it tries to assimilate the drive. You should get a popup window or some sort of prompt that will ask you if you want this to happen (i.e., found new hardware, etc.). An easy way to test this theory would be to load a backup Tivo image onto a spare drive and then leave it connected when booting into XP to see what transpires.



ciper said:


> Hmm, I might be remembering wrong but I thought Fdisk would see the Tivo partitions as unknown.
> 
> To the original poster please use gparted live http://gparted-livecd.tuxfamily.org/
> Or if you insist on dos try http://www.freedos.org/ as it has a free fdisk that I think supports linux partitions.


I can't say since I've not used fdisk for looking at a Tivo drive. I would assume it would either see it as an unknown partition type or just not see it at all.


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