I have an old 30GB Quantum Fireball from a Tivo machine that I would like to format to NTFS. Right now it looks like 8MB to XP, so the low level format program won't run because it reports that the disk is too small. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

8 MB or 8 GB ?

If 8 MB (MEGAbytes) there's something strange.
Does it work correctly on the Tivo ?
If yes, use MHDD to determine if the drive has been custom configured or there's HPA on, then post again .

8MB (megabytes!) is what Windows reports. Out of curiosity I looked at the drive on my Ubuntu box and it could format and access 30GB, so I deleted the 8MB partition, made one large partition using the entire 30GB drive, formatted it, but XPSP3 still reports 8 MB.

I burned a CD with your MHDD program (thank you for making that iso image available) and did a full scan (nothing > 50ms), looked at SMART numbers (some were at the max, maybe the drive is dying?), ran nhpa, did a low level format, the drive was showing as expected at 30GB. Back on the XP box... 8MB. Have you ever seen anything like that?

Apologies, I forgot to mention that the TIVO was given to me to salvage parts from, and no one know if it was working or not. The hdd may be why it was scrapped, but I don't know that.

its not in a windows format tivo machines
run on a linux based.
so that why its not reporting the same gig
your have to reformat with knoppix




Several Linux utilities can cleanse files and drives, and all do the same thing. Wipe has more options than some of the other tools, including the ability to erase a block of data on a partition.

If the target drive is installed in a working system, the easiest way to clean it is to run wipe off of a Linux live CD. Knoppix, the granddaddy of Linux live distributions, comes with a ready-to-use version of wipe. To get started, download and burn the latest version of Knoppix, then put the CD in the CD drive of the target machine and boot. If all goes well, Knoppix should boot and present the KDE interface.

Similar utilities

wipe is not the only utility for cleansing files and disk drives. shred is another, it can do anything that wipe can do. Another tool is the secure-delete suite, which comes with four separate programs: srm, smem, sfill, and sswap.

* srm is used for deleting files and directories.
* smem wipes memory space.
* sfill cleanses the free space on a drive.
* sswap cleans swap spaces.

All of these tools essentially do the same thing, and they all do it well.

Launch Konsole, KDE's terminal emulator, using the icon in the bottom toolbar. Find the partition names of the target hard drive by listing all of the disk devices in the /dev directory. For IDE drives, run ls /dev/hd*. For SCSI drives, use ls /dev/sd*. The command should list several items. The primary drive is typically /dev/hda or /dev/sda. There will be an item in the output for every partition on the device.

It should go without saying that running wipe will nuke everything on the target file system. Everything beyond this point is destructive, so make sure anything important is backed up.

Wipe's developers suggest only wiping one partition at a time, so for every partition, including the swap partition, run the command sudo wipe /dev/partition. Use the sudo command so that there are no permission errors. The wipe process will take several hours to complete for a moderate-sized hard drive. If you want it to go faster you can tell it how many passes you want it to make by using the -Q option with a number less than the default of 4. However, the more passes wipe makes, the better the protection, at least in theory.

If the target drive is not in a working machine, you can place it in a USB enclosure and attach that to a Linux machine. Note that most window managers will automatically mount external USB storage devices when they are attached; unmount the drive before running wipe. If wipe is not already installed on the machine, install it using your distribution's package manager. Next, launch a terminal session, find the device, and run wipe on each partition, using the command above.

Thanks for the reply craig6928,

Would you mind explaining (or telling me where I can read up on) the difference between doing a Linux wipe of the drive, and using MHDD to do a low level format? I thought the llf would wipe out everything on the drive but that is obviously not right. What can wipe do that is different from a llf?

Thanks,
Mike

Low level format = fill drive with "0" (actually is not technically a low level format, that is another thing) so any reference to filesystem etc. and obviously data is lost.

You can examine the partition table and boot sector with Microsoft's Sector Inspector:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/SecInspect.zip

Extract the above archive to the one folder and execute the SIrun.bat file. The procedure will generate a report file named SIout.txt.

I think I'll use it for the linux box and forget about it. I believe I need to do a LLF to fix it but Ubuntu may be able to use it as it is.

If you use Computer Management in The control panel under administrative tools of XP
and check under Disk Managment

What does windows report the disk to be?

Does it show the whole disk as a 8mb drive, or do you see unidentified partitions ?

If you see a 30gb of combined partitions - try to delete partions using windows (sometimes you cant do this on some partitions such as unix linux based and need to use the steps as above the delete the partitions) then try in windows again.

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I copied my Ubuntu disk to the new disk no problems accessing all 30GB, problem solved. Thank you for all of your help to everyone who posted. HDDGURU... Your programs are really impressive.