Need help with 500gb hitachi sata hard drive from Dish Box

[Joshua Belcher]

I'll try to explain this with all the details as possible, Firstly, I have already Googled this, but I can't seem to find anything exactly that will help me. I pulled a 500gb Hitachi sata 3.0 hard drive from an old Dish VIP722k receiver. I want to use it as an external drive on my PC. Now, I'm having difficulty formatting it, I've tried disk management, all the options are greyed out except for the properties option, which doesn't let you do anything but view the status of the device. I'm using a simple sata to usb connector with a usb cable to connect this drive to the usb on my pc, now I have been using my internal PS3 320gb hdd for an external drive on my PC, and this method worked exactly the same, the formatting worked perfectly, and the adapter was powered and worked like a charm, but the connectors are the same, the hard drives are of different sizes, the ps3 hdd is small and compact, whilst the hdd I'm trying to format is larger. "Speaking of actual physical size that is."

I've tried to use a WD Quick format utility, but it doesn't recognize the drive, if I could just format it via Windows 7 disk management, then I'd have absolutely no use for any utilities.

If it helps here's my specs, I don't see how they could help though,
Gt520 ZoTac 1gb
2.80 gigahertz AMD Athlon II X2 240
4gb ram
Internal 500gb hdd
ZT SYSTEMS MS-7309 1.0
Enclosure Type: Desktop
Board: MS-7309 1.0
Bus Clock: 200 megahertz
BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. V9.7B7 12/08/2009
Windows 7 Home Premium (x64) Service Pack 1 (build 7601)

 

[mbarnes86]

Hi

It is likely that the set top box ran some sort of Linux or Unix with unix partition format such as Ext3

If so you need a live Linux CD such as Parted Magic to remove the old partition and create a new Windows compatible partition.

If connected by eSATA or internally to SATA port then the manufacturers bootable hard disk diagnostics may have option to wipe the Partition Cylinder (MBR) which is much quicker than a full low level format

Most of these tools do not work over USB to SATA bridge connections.

regards

Mike Barnes

 

[Joshua Belcher]

Would I have to remove my current internal HDD to use Parted Magic, or uninstall Windows?

Can I run Parted Magic alongside my Windows 7?

 

[Joshua Belcher]

I also need to let you know that I am getting a cyclic redundancy error directly after failing to initialize the Disk. The drive is blacked out in Disk Management, and I'm unable to run a chkdsk, format it, even Kill Disk is giving me Error 23 when trying to kill the data stored on the drive.

I know the drive isn't failing, as I watched Raiders of The Lost Ark I had saved to the Dish box's DVR, and surfed the menus before very carefully removing the drive.