Reformat DVR hard drive for PC use

It is sata

 

yea it works just fine.

 

you have to use the box to start the drive. DVR's use a weird hardware call to spin up, and shut down the drive. to get the drive to spin up all you have to do is record something using the DVR. the drive will then initialize and you can hot swap it from the box to the PC. the fun doesn't stop there, you then have to modify the drive's firmware to turn hardware calls off. the drive's firmware interface looks allot like what you would find on a SCSI/SAS drive.

if you managed to get this far you have 2 out comes

1.) if your lucky you now have a drive that cant handle day to day PC activity's.(("these drives have variable motors they may say they operate at 5200RPMS on the tin but more like than not the drive will probably only cap out at about 3200RPMs, even worse is the 1990's cache size of 2mb if your lucky."))


2.) if your not so lucky you now have a paperweight(("some DVR drives only respond to those commands even if you bybassed the drive's calls properly the drive will never respond to the hardware calls required to operate again....ever."))

 

i had try use my xternal hdd as a dvr on my smart tv. Smart tv then formating it into dvr format. I tried then to use as xternal hdd back on my notebook. Suddenly it cant detect as a drive. I tried several way and this one work.

1- Launch computer management which is located in the >control panel>administrative tools
2- select storage>Disk management
3- format the drive and assign a drive letter or
4- (if the drive is formated) right click at the drive then select >change drive letter and path
5- here u go..the drive is now useable

*im using windows 7 ultimate

 

you did not read the op's question nor the answer diectly above your post this is NOT an hdd from an external housing nor is it from a pc or a bought oem part it is from a dvd recorder with an internal hdd already installed your smart tv is also not a dvr in the context this thread is in

 

Couldn't have said it better myself. Besides all that the point to this topic is no longer of interest to me. I have long since given up and I don't even know where the hard drive got to. It's not in my hands anymore. Although if anyone does find out anything about performing this task of formatting a dvr hard drive for pc use please tell me all you know.

 

Start >settings> control panel> admin tools >computer management >disk manager.

delete the volumes and reformat the entire disk ... it should step you through a wizard.

 

hello all i know this is an old thread and im new here but i have figured the solution. i took all the posts i read in this thread and used all the data to formulate the solution

the main tools you will need is a working directv dvr in my case a HR22-100 it has a 500gb seagate hdd model ST3500312CS

and HDAT2 bootable cd

these drives are DCO frozen you have to boot the drive up in the dvr so it wakes and unlocks them then do a hotswap meaning leaving power to the drive after it activates then connect the sata connector to a computer and boot the computer with hdat2 cd.

the proceadure:

1: select option 1 from the menu
2: once it goes to a command prompt type HDAT2
3: once HDAT2 has started select the drive model that you are working on and press enter
4: the first thing under the menu you want to do is select "Device Configuration Overlay (DCO) menu"
under there you need to select "Restore" at the bottom of the screen it will prompt you for a Yes/No just hit Y let it do its thing and it should comeback with some code and some words in green.

5: now we need to hit escape till were back to the menu and we need to select "Comands Menu" and hit enter
under comands menu select "commands/feature sets" and hit enter you will see a lot of things in gray and yellow we are only going to touch one thing here and thats the "Power-Up In Standby (PUIS)" we want to disable this by highlighting it and pushing the right arrow then hit the s key it will prompt you for a Y or N ht Y for yes it will say working and then should finish wothout error and turn to dissabled.

now to test to make sure it worked. remove the boot cd turn the computer off. disconnect the drive from the computer now put the drive in the computer and connect to computer sata and computer sata power power on the computer go to bios see if the drive shows its information. if so you can now use the drive like a standard sata drive.

for me what i did was after unlocking the drive i connected it to a computer running windows 7 via usb enclosure/dock and used easus partition to prepare the drive and it is working perfect just like a new 500gb hdd

NOTES and WARNINGS:

the drive MUST maintain power at all times during the proceadure if the drive looses power it will lock and you have to start over. just the nature of the beast

doing this will also make the drive non useable in any directv hd dvr this removes directv's custom firmware codes and flags.


if anyone wants a pdf with step by step pictures and instructions let me know if i was allowed to upload it here i would.

enjoy and any questions feel free to ask and if anyone trys this and is successfull please report back.

also this should work for any device locked drive it does not even have to be a directv box.

the hotswap trick is what we had to do for the old xbox hdd's they were also dco locked.

 

@wvtimberwolf

Hey, thanks a bunch. This did the trick for a drive that came out of a DVR. Just like you mentioned, the PUIS was enabled, keeping the drive from spinning up. I used a newer version of HDAT2 and some of the menus were just a little different, but close enough to follow your instructions.

After I was done, the drive would spin up normally, but still wasn't being detected by Windows. The BIOS did see the drive.

I booted to EASE Partition Master and found there were 3 partitions. After repartitioning and formatting it, it worked perfectly internally and with an external adapter.

Thanks again for putting together such a thorough tutorial.

 

I am having the same problem with a 500GB Toshiba portable hard drive. I had to use this portable hard drive to save some things from my Dish DVR and now I can't reformat the drive to use on my PC. It is listed in my "Devices and printers" and as a "Disk 5" in "Disk Management"
But, I can find no way to reformat. The only option I am given is to "convert to dynamic disk"
I can see no way to reformat the drive.
Can anyone help me? Thank you

 

Do you mean the "Disk 5" that it is listed as in "Disk Management"?
Is that what I need to do?
thank you

 

I hit the delete on "Disk 5", but it is not gone completely. It says I have 465.76 GB unallocated on "Disk 5".
What do I do now? If I right click on it, I have three choices:
1. New "Simple Volume"
2. "Convert to Dynamic Disk" or
3. "Convert to GPT Disk"

Now what?
Thank you

 

Thank you for your help. I did the new volume and gave it a name, and everything is working fine.
Thank you again for your help

 

option 4 there is no Device Configuration Overlay menu its called Device test menu? So you what can i do?

 

wbtimberwolf hasn't been here in over 2 years. Maybe ddp can walk you through this.