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Format a hard drive from a dvr

M

Modplod

macrumors newbie
Original poster
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?
 
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.
 
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
 
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....
 
That must be it......if it is I feel at least it was an impossible task not a lack of knowledge on my part....into the trash it goes
 
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