HDAT2 forum

I have a Maxtor 6E040L0 40 gig that was pulled from an unknown model of DVR, possibly a TiVo. (I know it didn't come from an Ultimate TV DVR, there's a special util just for those that only works on drives from UTV DVRs, and it didn't work. Somehow it just forces the drive to secure erase itself, if it was in a UTV DVR.)

It did show up at full capacity in BIOS setup. I used mhdd's erase function to wipe it but still FDISK said there was an error.

After trying diskutil, HDDErase, mhdd, and atapwd I found a program called qunlock. That one worked, sort of. It made FDISK able to see it but with a capacity of only 9 meg of which it would only allow 8 meg to be used. BIOS now says it's a 10 meg drive.

With hdat2 4.7.1 it says DCO area is disabled but also frozen so none of the features to change the max LBA will work. I tried the trick of plugging in the IDE cable after booting but then hdat2 won't detect the drive. (And neither will any of the other utilities.)

I'm using an Intel SE440BX-2 motherboard with just a floppy drive and this hard drive connected, to ensure I don't accidentally wipe anything I don't want wiped. Right now the only other board I have available to work with is an Intel DK440LX. The latest BIOS for that one added support for drives over 8 gig, dunno if it'd support a 40 gig.

If I must, I can unplug everything from my system with an MSI 7125 board or my Dell Dimension B110 to work on this drive.

Hi,

is your HDD Maxtor 6E040L0 in BIOS recognised as Maxtor 6E040L0
or wrongly recognised as N40P?

In this case is firmware corrupted.

It's recognized as a Maxtor 6E040L0 with a 10 meg capacity. FDISK sees it as 9 meg but will only create an 8 meg partition.

Before I started trying these utilities, BIOS recognized the full capacity but the drive wasn't usable. I tried a Windows program, HDD Capacity Restore but that didn't work, claims the factory capacity is only 10 meg so there's "nothing wrong".

I tried HDAT2 with the drive connected to the Dimension B110 but same thing as with theSE440BX-2, DCO is disabled and frozen and plugging in the IDE cable after booting, HDAT2 cannot detect the drive.

I don't have any experiences with TiVo/DVR HDD, so on Google

http://www.google.cz/search?hl=cs&sourc ... =&aq=f&oq=

I found:

http://archive.tivocommunity.com/tivo-v ... 630-1.html
http://techpatterns.com/forums/about732.html
http://www.9thtee.com/MFS20howto.htm

I hope it will help you.

Why HDAT2 cannot detect drive afte plugging the IDE cable?
I don't know, it should normally detect, maybe it is issue from BIOS.

Finally, hopefully, got it working. Hooked it up to an XP system and created as large a partition as it would allow, then used Kill MBR. That reset the LBA count to what it's supposed to be.

BUT then it was claiming SMART status was bad. Fortunately after zeroing it with the last version of PowerMax that went away and it's currently being formatted by XP's install. That's where the hopefully cones in - if it finishes the full format it should be OK.

Hello!
I have a similar problem, I am now in a process of making an old PC of parts that are leftovers. Everything works fine except for Maxtor 6E040L0 that I got from a friend of mine and neither of us know what it was used for before that. But the fact is that 40 GB HDD allows to see and fully use only ~10 GB, I have already tried to install WinXP and everything works fine so that is basically why I am looking for the cure, if it works fine with 10 GB than there must be a way to unlock the whole capacity (or not). I've been googling for the solution and noticed that I am not the only one who suffers this kind of inconvenience. I honestly hope that You can help me with my problem. I would like to know more about this "Kill MBR" procedure and how harmful it is (will I still be able to use 10 GB if something goes wrong?). Anxiously waiting for any replies.

Google for it, easy enough to find Kill MBR.

In my case, low level formatting with PowerMax didn't keep it working. It came up with some errors after installing XP and I got the SMART status bad again during POST. Most likely it got worn out when it was in the DVR.

I'll go for it, lets see what happens.

Sadly no luck, I'm not 100% sure I have done it right, but in the end, think I'd better stick with what I got.