Could you use a TIVO hard drive as a PC hard drive?

[63dot]

My neighbor found a discarded TIVO in the trash and saved the hard drive, which says Seagate, 40 GB, Ultra ATA.

When he tries to put it into his PC, the CMOS chip in it tells you it's a hard drive but won't let it get a drive letter assigned to it. Something is locking him out of making this a regular PC hard drive.

Is their anyway to jailbreak that TIVO hard drive and install a fresh, brand new version of Windows on it, or is this hard drive only for TIVOs?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Eidorian]

You're probably going to need to partition and format using Disk Management if it doesn't mount normally.

 

[TEG]

TiVo uses a non-standard, at least in the PC world, format for their hard drives. Your friend will have to use fdisk to delete the partition then recreate it as a FAT partition.

 

[bradl]

TiVo uses a non-standard, at least in the PC world, format for their hard drives. Your friend will have to use fdisk to delete the partition then recreate it as a FAT partition.

+1

Either the Linux or DOS-based fdisk will take care of it. delete the partition, create a new primary partition (you can choose how big you want the partition to be), be sure the label (assuming XP) is FAT32, or (possibly) NTFS. FAT32 will definitely work, then have windows format it however you want. I can't remember for certain if XP supports NTFS.

BL.