reuse Tivo drives as a drive for a PC?

[aprest]

After successfully hacking my HR10-250 Tivo units I have ended up with a bunch of Western Digital and Seagate 250 GB and 300 GB drives that I would like to use in my PC. I tried formatting some of them with no success using Seagate, Maxtor and Western Digital disk tools. I also tried to format them in Windows 2000 with no success. None of the formatting attempts show the full size of the drives.

How can I format these for use with my Windows 2000 PC?

[luder]

After successfully hacking my HR10-250 Tivo units I have ended up with a bunch of Western Digital and Seagate 250 GB and 300 GB drives that I would like to use in my PC. I tried formatting some of them with no success using Seagate, Maxtor and Western Digital disk tools. I also tried to format them in Windows 2000 with no success. None of the formatting attempts show the full size of the drives.

How can I format these for use with my Windows 2000 PC?

Did you take a look in bios ?

[captain_video]

They should work fine in your PC. Make sure you reset the jumpers correctly. If you have a problem trying to format the drives then run a quick low-level format to wipe the boot record and 1st 100 sectors or so on the drive. Most diagnostic tools from the drive manufacturers have this option in the software. This should allow you to format the drive normally using whatever utility you desire.

[JWThiers]

did you try to first delete the partition? fdisk

[classicsat]

What do you mean "not full size of the drives"? Does your OS support LBA48 (>137GB drives)?

[aprest]

What do you mean "not full size of the drives"? Does your OS support LBA48 (>137GB drives)?

The 250 GB drive was showing as 8 GB. I think I have figured it out. I booted using an old Windows 98 boot disk and ran fdisk to set one large partition but the BIOS on that PC would not recognize it correctly and it showed a 128 GB drive. Windows 2000 on that PC showed the same thing and I could not change the partition. I then attached the drive to another PC that can recognize larger drives and Windows 2000 on that PC allowed me to set the partition to the full size of the drive and format it. I am going to change out the motherboard on my hacking computer to one that can handle larger drives so that I don't have BIOS problems in the future. This will give me a multi purpose PC that can be used primarily for hacking but could be used for other things. This way I won't have to use my two main PC towers for hacking: one that I use for general purpose functions like word processing and taxes, and Quicken; and one that is dedicated to picture and video editing.