# Series 1 - locked drive?



## stamasd (Jun 26, 2002)

I have a HDR112 that has been working nicely for the past 12 years (bought it originally on August 23rd, 2000). A couple of weeks ago it stopped working, and I suspected the HD was bad. This is the 3rd hard disk that I used for this unit, a Maxtor 120GB that I put in it 4 or 5 years ago. I can replace it with a virgin drive, but I'd prefer if at all possible to recover some shows from that drive so I'm first trying to make a copy with all streams on it. 

The drive isn't dead, it powers up and spins. However when I boot one of the upgrade CDs (so far I tried the LBA48 CD from ptvupgrade, and also the MFSlive 1.4CD) it shows as exactly 20000 sectors, 10MB. It acts as if it were locked - which is weird, as none of my TiVos had locked a drive before. 

Long story short, I mounted the drive as secondary slave (/dev/hdd) and used diskutil -u 3 on it.
It reported that the operation was successful, but now after power cycling the drive shows as 0 sectors, capacity=0MB. 

I'm out of ideas, and thought I'd better check here before doing anything else.


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## mr.unnatural (Feb 2, 2006)

Is there a limiting jumper setting on the drive? Some drives have a jumper setting that limits the capacity to 10GB.


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## stamasd (Jun 26, 2002)

There is no limiting jumper, and the capacity read was 10MB, not 10GB.

Besides, the drive worked as it was in my TiVo at full capacity (120GB) for over 5 years.


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## sbourgeo (Nov 10, 2000)

Have you tried unlocking the disk? The MFSLive cd comes with the diskutil utility, which should do the job.


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## stamasd (Jun 26, 2002)

sbourgeo said:


> Have you tried unlocking the disk? The MFSLive cd comes with the diskutil utility, which should do the job.


Yes I did, please see the original post.


stamasd said:


> Long story short, I mounted the drive as secondary slave (/dev/hdd) and used diskutil -u 3 on it.
> It reported that the operation was successful, but now after power cycling the drive shows as 0 sectors, capacity=0MB.


That's where I am now. After using diskutil, the drive now reads as zero sectors.


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## sbourgeo (Nov 10, 2000)

stamasd said:


> Yes I did, please see the original post.


Sorry, I could have sworn that text wasn't there when I read your original post.  At this point, I would say your best bet would be to run the manufacturer disk diags on it (likely Seagate SeaTools now). I have an ancient Maxtor 120 GB drive currently running in a DSR6000 that has issues, so I do have a few old versions of Maxtor Powermax disk diags hanging around if you're so inclined. I think they want to create a boot floppy though...


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## stamasd (Jun 26, 2002)

I'll see if I can get by with what's on Hiren's boot CD as it does include quite a few disk utilities. If it comes down to floppies, the only computer I have that still has a FDD is a 386SX/25. 

My actual impression though is that the drive is probably not locked - not in the classic sense. It's probably just its particular way of dying.


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

stamasd said:


> I'll see if I can get by with what's on Hiren's boot CD as it does include quite a few disk utilities. If it comes down to floppies, the only computer I have that still has a FDD is a 386SX/25.
> 
> My actual impression though is that the drive is probably not locked - not in the classic sense. It's probably just its particular way of dying.


I know that some of the Maxtor drives that were installed in Tivos showed a very small size with ordinary disk tools. There is a utility called QUNLOCK that is supposed to "release" the rest of the space.


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## stamasd (Jun 26, 2002)

lillevig said:


> I know that some of the Maxtor drives that were installed in Tivos showed a very small size with ordinary disk tools. There is a utility called QUNLOCK that is supposed to "release" the rest of the space.


However, qunlock is reported to destroy drives that don't have original Quantum firmware if used on them. My drive is a Maxtor dated 03/2003, after the Quantum acquisition - yet I am reluctant to use it if there's any chance of getting it recognized by any other means.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

stamasd said:


> However, qunlock is reported to destroy drives that don't have original Quantum firmware if used on them. My drive is a Maxtor dated 03/2003, after the Quantum acquisition - yet I am reluctant to use it if there's any chance of getting it recognized by any other means.


As far as I know, any drive that can be unlocked by qunlock can be unlocked by diskutil.

Were you doing any of this on a GigaByte brand motherboard by any chance?

Anyway, get SeaTools and run the short test and then the long test on it.


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## stamasd (Jun 26, 2002)

unitron said:


> As far as I know, any drive that can be unlocked by qunlock can be unlocked by diskutil.
> 
> Were you doing any of this on a GigaByte brand motherboard by any chance?
> 
> Anyway, get SeaTools and run the short test and then the long test on it.


No, Asus motherboard (A8N-SLI). Will try some disk tools when I get home.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

stamasd said:


> No, Asus motherboard (A8N-SLI). Will try some disk tools when I get home.


Probably just about time for that motherboard to start having capacitor problems.

And by SeaTools I specifically mean the downloadable bootable cd image from Seagate (who bought Maxtor several years back) with their diagnostic software on it.


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

stamasd said:


> However, qunlock is reported to destroy drives that don't have original Quantum firmware if used on them. My drive is a Maxtor dated 03/2003, after the Quantum acquisition - yet I am reluctant to use it if there's any chance of getting it recognized by any other means.


Given that after diskutil it is now showing 0MB it probably can't get any worse. In any case, either Unitron or I can provide you will a nice Philips S1 image with the LBA48 patch if you need to burn a new drive. The image will work on any drive larger than 13GB.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

lillevig said:


> Given that after diskutil it is now showing 0MB it probably can't get any worse. In any case, either Unitron or I can provide you will a nice Philips S1 image with the LBA48 patch if you need to burn a new drive. The image will work on any drive larger than 13GB.


Still, better to run Seatools first and see what's going on, and maybe take a look at it with

hdparm

from the MFS Live cd as well to see what we can learn.


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