Original Tivo 40Gb HDD shrinking !!!

[bonfire02]

Picked up one of those Maplin Bare Bone DTR's today.Thought I'd pop my original 40 Gb Tivo HDD in it.(Quantum Fireball).However the PVR shows it as 9 Mb in size and thus wont format it.Is there some kind of lock on it to stop it displaying its real size or have I got a dodgy item.The original disc was working perfectly a year ago when I upgraded the HDD.The machine is working fine as a freeview box.TIA

[cwaring]

Hi there! Numerous threads on this throughout the years. Should probably be in the FAQ by now ;)
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=287137

[terryeden]

The original ones were locked. This was back when 40GB drives were very expensive. You can unlock it using Qunlock - from http://www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/index9.html

[bonfire02]

Thanks for the info guys.Unlocking the disk seems quite a job(for me at least!)The fact that the orginal disk is at least 5 years old and is quite noisy in the PVR casing(it never was in the Tivo)means that I'll probably buy a 80 Gb drive for the PVR.Its only a back up to the Tivo after all !
Any suggestions for a quite(and cheap)80Gb drive

[Pete77]

Any suggestions for a quite(and cheap)80Gb drive

80Gb 3.5" drives aren't cost effective these days as they cost about £30 delivered.

Whereas you can get a super quiet 400Gb Samsung HDLD drive for £57.58 delivered from:-

www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?SAM-S400P

When it comes to tv programs you can't really have too much capacity.

You can also unlock the Quantum drives with diskutil. In fact our Dutch Tivo cousins (who I have only just learned even existed) have written a rather nice article about why Diskutil is better than Qunlock.

See http://nltivo.net/index.php/Unlock_Maxtor_HDD

Or see the info on diskutil and using it on Steve Conrad's site at www.steveconrad.co.uk/tivo/upgrade3.html

[mikerr]

The original ones were locked.
Sorry to be picky :D but its the tivo unit itself that attempts to lock the drives on every single bootup.
The locking method only works on quantum and older maxtors though,
so we never see that problem anymore with samungs...