Safe disposal of a dead MyDVR Expander

[squiredogs]

I replaced my original WD MYDVR Expander (the 500 gig) when it died a couple of years ago with a newer 1 TB model. Damn those lost recordings... Anyway, I assume it's not safe to just chuck it or recycle it, since my TiVo account numbers might be on there somehow. Is there a way to safely get rid of this thing without any security risk?

[steve614]

Take it to the gun range.

Or maybe a sledgehammer.

[janry]

The drive itself may be OK. Get a case and use it as an external drive for your PC. That is what I did with mine.

[ThAbtO]

Tivo number is not stored on the hard drive, its really on a chip in the Tivo. When you remove an external, the drive is basically "wiped", all recordings were stored on both the internal and external drives at the same time, spread across both.

[MeInDallas]

Originally Posted by janry

The drive itself may be OK. Get a case and use it as an external drive for your PC. That is what I did with mine.

I would open it up and take the drive out and hook it up to a computer and see if its actually dead first, like he said. I had one of these too and it died and took the drive out and it was just fine. Might as well find out if its actually dead. There might be a good hard drive in there.

[unitron]

Originally Posted by squiredogs

I replaced my original WD MYDVR Expander (the 500 gig) when it died a couple of years ago with a newer 1 TB model. Damn those lost recordings... Anyway, I assume it's not safe to just chuck it or recycle it, since my TiVo account numbers might be on there somehow. Is there a way to safely get rid of this thing without any security risk?

Send it to me.

If the drive still works I'll run

dd

or the WD diagnostic disc to write all zeros to it.

I'm not smart enough, educated enough, or experienced enough to be able to extract any data from it beyond the partition map.

The only numbers that might be on there would maybe be the TSN of the TiVo and the MAK of your account.

Even if you entered a credit card number via the unit itself instead of the TiVo website, that would be on the internal drive.