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Format a hard drive from a dvr

M

Modplod

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 24, 2013
24
0
Northern California
Got a wd 320 gig black sata hard drive out of a dvr. Trying to format it for my Mac Pro. Disk utility shows it as having 0% capacity. Have tried partitioning it with gparted boot disk without success

Does anyone have any ideas?
 
ActionableMango

ActionableMango

macrumors G3
Sep 21, 2010
9,612
6,907
There were other responses here that were destroyed due to the system restore.

Anyway, you can completely zero the drive using OS X command line "dd". This will wipe out partitioning and everything.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)#Disk_wipe

Just be sure you do the correct drive! Wikipedia's example is for /dev/sda, which is not necessarily the drive you want to wipe.

If you don't know what any of this means, don't do it.
 
M

Modplod

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 24, 2013
24
0
Northern California
I tried various options including all the programs on UBCD......they all reported that the drive had been wiped by writing zeros to the drive or similar. I did a lot of this in a pc I have as well but after every attempt I tried the drive in my mac and it continued to show the drive as having 0% capacity. It showed up in the bios of the pc as a 320 gb drive but when I tried to install windows to it it could not find the drive....

I appreciate the help but I am about to throw this drive in the trash
 
Dr. Stealth

Dr. Stealth

macrumors 6502a
Sep 14, 2004
813
739
SoCal-Surf City USA
Modplod said:
I tried various options including all the programs on UBCD......they all reported that the drive had been wiped by writing zeros to the drive or similar. I did a lot of this in a pc I have as well but after every attempt I tried the drive in my mac and it continued to show the drive as having 0% capacity. It showed up in the bios of the pc as a 320 gb drive but when I tried to install windows to it it could not find the drive....

I appreciate the help but I am about to throw this drive in the trash
Click to expand...


I do not know if this is your issue but.... I have seen other drives like this (mainly from Western Digital) that have proprietary firmware on the drive and could not be reformatted. It sux but it's true....
 
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