Hard drive from a pvr

[Jasonizer]

Re: Hard drive from a pvr

i belive that there is a jumper on that sata hardrive

[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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[OniJon]

Re: Hard drive from a pvr

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

[davg]

Re: Hard drive from a pvr

Try Killdisk
http://how-to-erase-hard-drive.com/

Thanks but as I understand it the ATA password is part of the disk firmware and erasing a disk will not do it..

[OniJon]

Re: Hard drive from a pvr

Try Killdisk
http://how-to-erase-hard-drive.com/

[davg]

Re: Hard drive from a pvr

You can use Seatools to zerofill the drive, and i think you already did it
with the erase function.
I don't like seatools, if i remember correctly it doesn't tell you
if a drive is simply locked and fail any test.

I suggest you a quick way to point out if your drive is locked (and possibly healthy) or bad in some way.

Download MHDD from this site

http://hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

and burn the iso to a CD-ROM (or use the floppy image)

Connect to your pc just the hard drive to test and a CD-DVD Rom
and then boot from it.
The drive MUST be connected to a true IDE channel, not RAID or
AHCI.
It will boot in plain DOS and will load MHDD in few seconds,
MHDD will scan all ATA channel and show you any drive connected.
Select the right drive by the number MHDD assigned to it and if
it is locked MHDD will show you it immediately with a warning
message.

Then press F8 and you will get the SMART information of the drive,
look for "reallocated sector count" and for "current pending sectors"
values that give a quick info if the drive is degrading.

Then press twice F4 and MHDD will start to scan the disk and
show you any bad or slow zone of your disk.

You can also use Hiren's Boot CD 15.1 from here

http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/

it's a live cd that contains MHDD and a lots of free tools.

Good Luck!

Thanks nappa great info and it do show that the drive is password locked. Using mhdd to unlock requires a password that I can't provide?? Is there a default password? Is there some other way to unlock the drive without the high cost? Firmware update is one possibility but where can one find firmware for these drives?

[noppa]

Re: Hard drive from a pvr

You can use Seatools to zerofill the drive, and i think you already did it
with the erase function.
I don't like seatools, if i remember correctly it doesn't tell you
if a drive is simply locked and fail any test.

I suggest you a quick way to point out if your drive is locked (and possibly healthy) or bad in some way.

Download MHDD from this site

http://hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

and burn the iso to a CD-ROM (or use the floppy image)

Connect to your pc just the hard drive to test and a CD-DVD Rom
and then boot from it.
The drive MUST be connected to a true IDE channel, not RAID or
AHCI.
It will boot in plain DOS and will load MHDD in few seconds,
MHDD will scan all ATA channel and show you any drive connected.
Select the right drive by the number MHDD assigned to it and if
it is locked MHDD will show you it immediately with a warning
message.

Then press F8 and you will get the SMART information of the drive,
look for "reallocated sector count" and for "current pending sectors"
values that give a quick info if the drive is degrading.

Then press twice F4 and MHDD will start to scan the disk and
show you any bad or slow zone of your disk.

You can also use Hiren's Boot CD 15.1 from here

http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/

it's a live cd that contains MHDD and a lots of free tools.

Good Luck!

[jsmoke]

Re: Hard drive from a pvr

you will not get this drive to work outside of the 9200 easily, will work in other ird's but not in pc easily

[japlytic]

Re: Hard drive from a pvr

Some PVRs (mainly from providers) password protect the hard drive, and it is a possibility that some can keep the recordings in the host protected area.

[davg]

Re: Hard drive from a pvr

If it's not locked try to zerofill at least some megabytes
from LBA 0, i had some drives with corrupted MBR / partition
table that didn't initialize from windows and solved this way.
Also some drive with bad sector at the very beginning of the
disk may cause this.
I presume it's a seagate since you used Seatools,
does it pass quick test?
Can you show smart parameters?

Thanks noppa yes it is a Seagate ST3250820SCE. So what software did you use to zerofill from LBA 0? One program I used (and I am not sure now which because I tried so many) gave an Error LIBPARTED BUG FOUND: input/output error during read on dev/sda. I will not pass quick test in SeaTools. I do believe there may be some bad sectors at the beginning when I try to clean the disk in SeaTools it do list some bad sectors and gives me an option to try again or ignore? Not sure what choosing ignore will do?

[davg]

Re: Hard drive from a pvr

i scalp drives from pvr's all the time! if visible in disk management, just repartition it!

Before I can partition it I need to Initialize it and that is where the problem lies. Even though it shows up in disk management it is flagged and will not initialize?

[noppa]

Re: Hard drive from a pvr

If it's not locked try to zerofill at least some megabytes
from LBA 0, i had some drives with corrupted MBR / partition
table that didn't initialize from windows and solved this way.
Also some drive with bad sector at the very beginning of the
disk may cause this.
I presume it's a seagate since you used Seatools,
does it pass quick test?
Can you show smart parameters?

[t.j.]

Re: Hard drive from a pvr

i scalp drives from pvr's all the time! if visible in disk management, just repartition it!

[davg]

Re: Hard drive from a pvr

If the drive is locked with ATA password none of such tools will work.
Any command will be aborted by the drive.
Try to look at the drive with MHDD, it will tell you if
it's locked or not.
If you don't need data you can try a secure erase with MHDD.
Brand / Model of HD?
Take a look at this http://www.hddunlock.com/

It doesn't appear to be locked. If it is and it is going to cost 30.00 to have it unlocked it's not going to happen I will garbage it. Anyway it would appear they do have a secret I have tried several dos and windows based software even winhex and nothing seem to work. The disk do show up in SeaTools and disk management and winhex but that is as far as I get. It is driving me nuts.

[noppa]

Re: Hard drive from a pvr

If the drive is locked with ATA password none of such tools will work.
Any command will be aborted by the drive.
Try to look at the drive with MHDD, it will tell you if
it's locked or not.
If you don't need data you can try a secure erase with MHDD.
Brand / Model of HD?
Take a look at this http://www.hddunlock.com/

[davg]

Re: Hard drive from a pvr

Unless you want to recover some of the recordings on the drive, I would try a stand-alone disk utility. I would recommend the GParted Live CD, just delete all partitions, create a new partition table, and create new partitions:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

Make sure you are working on the correct drive. Maybe even go as far as unplugging all other hard drives before you boot the Live CD.

Thanks will give it a try Nothing to lose