Hard drive from a pvr

[OniJon]

Re: Hard drive from a pvr

Ok, try this http://hackaday.com/2011/02/18/hard-...word-recovery/

[gilly1984]

Re: Hard drive from a pvr

I have a sky hd hdd (500gb) and a virgin tivo hdd (500gb) in my pc and they both worked fine after going into disc management and converting them to Basic discs. These are 2 of the major players when it comes to encryption and stuff so you should be able to get your one going.

[noppa]

Re: Hard drive from a pvr

I'm sorry but I think that won't be easy to unlock that drive.
MHDD can unlock the drive only if you know the password but
can be used to see if the security mode is High or Maximum
by pressing ALT+F2.

According to this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paralle...s_and_security

it's possible to unlock a drive locked in high security mode issueing the MHDD
DISPWD command and providing a master password, but if security mode is
Maximum you can only Secure Erase the drive with a master password.

You can use this http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml
but you have to hope that the default master password has not been changed.
I found this http://ipv5.wordpress.com/2008/04/14...ter-passwords/

but i don't know if seagate had used different password for that drive family.

Secure Erase it's a built in fuction of the drive that completely delete
any sector of the drive and may take a very long time to complete, and,
if the drive is internally damaged may not end at all...

A better and quick way to unlock the drive would be to use some professional, and very expensive tool such as PCI3000, in many case it just requires few mouse clicks to complete the job.
Such tools do basically what OniJon suggested to do, but his hint works only
on some Western Digital drive, by rewriting a module of the hard disk firmware
where the password is stored; things works differently in seagate (and in other brand) drives.

http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracu...eft/td-p/47233
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/1556...erial-console/

lots of info can be found on hddguru.com, but this is a forum for professional
so few valuable info will leak.

best regards.

[noppa]

Re: Hard drive from a pvr

I forgot you may try to get some info from the maker of the PVR,
since the password is sent to the disk by its firmware it has to be there.

[davg]

Re: Hard drive from a pvr

I forgot you may try to get some info from the maker of the PVR,
since the password is sent to the disk by its firmware it has to be there.

Thanks noppa it is sort of hi-tech. I think I will content myself (on this drive at least) with using the harddrive as a backup or as an external for my 6131. I am still interested in learning how to unlock these drives and will continue to do more research and maybe some day will be successful. I have a 80 gig Maxtor One Touch in the same state that I will practice on. I am reading through the info you provided and hoping to learn from it.

[jsmoke]

Re: Hard drive from a pvr

Dont give up yet, if 9200 is anything like 9242 or 9241 you can do this as I can confirm it works.

How to activate VIP Hard Drive for general mounting 
The drive is shipped in "power-up in standby" mode

So, the drive is a paper weight until the ATA driver can spinup the drive from standby mode and unfortunately kernels prior to 2.6.24 cannot handle these drives without patching.

If you have a linux distribution with kernel less than 2.6.24 you may want to download patches and the hdparm from here

hxxp://superb-east.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/hdparm/hdparm-9.11.tar.gz

More info from the manpage of hdparm

Code:
    -s   Enable/disable the power-on in standby feature, if supported by
       the drive. VERY DANGEROUS. Do not use unless you are abso-
       lutely certain that both the system BIOS (or firmware) and the
       operating system kernel (Linux >= 2.6.22) support probing for
       drives that use this feature. When enabled, the drive is pow-
       ered-up in the standby mode to allow the controller to sequence
       the spin-up of devices, reducing the instantaneous current draw
       burden when many drives share a power supply. Primarily for use
       in large RAID setups. This feature is usually disabled and the
       drive is powered-up in the active mode (see -C above).  Note
       that a drive may also allow enabling this feature by a jumper.
       Some SATA drives support the control of this feature by pin 11
       of the SATA power connector. In these cases, this command may be
       unsupported or may have no effect.
So, the PIN 11 is missing on the SATA Power connector in the VIP boxes

On a linux > 2.2.24 system with a normal sata power cable you can just mount the drive without doing anything.

You can disable "Power Up in Standby Mode" with this

Code:
hdparm -s0 /dev/sdc
on my box its /dev/sdc - it could something like sdb or some thing else

run 
Code:
fdisk -l
to find out.

I dont think this is a security feature but has to do with initial power draw during power up

good luck

[Jasonizer]

Re: Hard drive from a pvr

i belive that there is a jumper on that sata hardrive