Reusing Hard Drives

[bucksy]

I pulled the 2 160 gig hard drives from my tivo unit when I switched to Dish is there a trick to using in a computer as regular hard drives or will windows vista see them and reformatte them?

 

[Ramy]

You can hook them up and reformat them if you want. Depends on what verion of Windows you have to whether or not you can use Disk Manger to reformat them. You may have to do it manually.

 

[Ronald_Jeremy]

If they are from a Tivo then the partitions are Linux. Windows won't recognize them. The partitions will need to be broken down with fdisk or a disk manager. Then a new DOS partition created and formatted in FAT32 or NTFS.

 

[TheForce]

I've reformatted 5 TIVO drives. I used the software from Maxtor to do it as it is much faster than using windows.

 

[diogen]

If at all possible, use QuickFormat under Windows: does the job in about a minute for a 1TB drive.

Diogen.

 

[bucksy]

what specific maxtor software did you use

 

[Neutron]

Yep, I've done that before. In fact, my test Linux install is on an old Tivo hard drive.