# Restore Tivo drive to use with Windows



## milmo12 (Mar 17, 2007)

I have a drive that I used for a Tivo upgrade (successfully) that I now want to use as a normal drive in a Windows XP system. How do I re-partition it from the TIVO format (it's a 160GB drive which shows up as only 9 MB in windows). Windows Disk Management doesn't work with it and neither Windows nor UNIX fdisk utilities see the TIVO partitions and allow a re-partitioning.

Thanks,


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## ggieseke (May 30, 2008)

I think the dskprobe.exe utility that comes in the Windows Support Tools would probably do the trick. If you open the correct physical drive (make darn sure which one you're working on) as read/write, zero every byte in the first sector and save your changes it should wipe the partition table.


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## ciper (Nov 4, 2004)

Is it a Maxtor/Quantum drive?


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## ptran11 (Apr 22, 2007)

milmo12 said:


> I have a drive that I used for a Tivo upgrade (successfully) that I now want to use as a normal drive in a Windows XP system. How do I re-partition it from the TIVO format (it's a 160GB drive which shows up as only 9 MB in windows). Windows Disk Management doesn't work with it and neither Windows nor UNIX fdisk utilities see the TIVO partitions and allow a re-partitioning.
> 
> Thanks,


If you're adding the tivo drive as a second drive you and use the built in windows disk management software to format the drive. If you're going to build a fresh install of windows using it as the primary drive the setup should see and format it.

One bug that I found when using the tivo drive to do a fresh install of xp was that the setup only saw half the drive space. I continued the install and used partition magic (a 3rd party tool) to regain the space as 1 single partition.

The tivo drive is basically a standard HD with linux partition.


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## mr.unnatural (Feb 2, 2006)

Download the drive's disk utility program from the manufacturer's website and run a low level format on the drive. You may have the option to format just the beginning of the drive, which wipes out the partition table. This should allow it to work fine with Windows Disk Management.


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## BTUx9 (Nov 13, 2003)

ptran11 said:


> The tivo drive is basically a standard HD with linux partition.


Actually, it's closest to a Mac partition.

There's a freeware partition manager called Ranish that should be able to wipe the partition table.


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