formatting a write protected drive

hellarda · 17 Apr 2011 at 16:57

hello

my mate just gave me an old 300gb sata drive from his Sky+ HD box, ive stuck it in my homeserver, however it is write protected, so whenever i try to format it, it says i cant cos its protected etc

I have tried booting into safe mode and tried the method outlined here http://en.kioskea.net/forum/affich-50059-a-the-disk-is-write-protecteda

neither of which worked :/

the server is running the lastest version of WHS 2011

and ideas of how i could formate this drive?

cheers

ali

AtaRo · 17 Apr 2011 at 17:43

Wipe the drive by writing zeros to it using windlg , then go to disk management and mount/format there.
Windlg is a western digital diagnostic program but it also works on other drives.

hellarda · 17 Apr 2011 at 19:40

thanks, i ran that but when it tried to write zeros, i get ther error: Sector#2048-2304::WriteZeros error! Continue?

if i click continue it just gets stuck immediately on another sector... :/

Krislord · 17 Apr 2011 at 19:59

I've not tried it but copy+ is designed for working with Sky+ drives so may be able to access it.

http://www.skycopyplus.co.uk/

hellarda · 17 Apr 2011 at 20:39

nope that doesnt even seem to recognise the drive.... :/ probably cos ive messed around with it :/

any more ideas? it seems to just be a standard write protected drive

RobFromTheWood · 17 Apr 2011 at 20:42

can you delete the partition in disk manager?

CaptainCrash · 17 Apr 2011 at 20:54

A bit of googling suggests the Sky+ box uses a proprietary filesystem, maybe it also uses a GPT protected partition or something similar.

Try cleaning it with the "diskpart" command as follows: Start menu > All programs > Accessories > Command prompt > (Right-click, "Run as administrator"), then enter the following commands:

diskpart

list disk (Lists all physical HDDs, make a note of the new one)

select disk # (where # is the new disk's number, make sure you select the right one!)

clean

exit

You should then be able to partition/format the disk in the normal way - you'll probably get a message saying the disk needs to be re-initialized, select "MBR" as the partition table type.

CaptainCrash · 17 Apr 2011 at 21:08

Double post, sorry, I'm half asleep.

AtaRo · 17 Apr 2011 at 21:13

hellarda said:
thanks, i ran that but when it tried to write zeros, i get ther error: Sector#2048-2304::WriteZeros error! Continue?

if i click continue it just gets stuck immediately on another sector... :/

Strange just did that a while back to a drive I took from a sky box

Found this http://www.paulsynnott.com/blog/2011/03/23/fix-hard-disk-write-protected-in-windows/

hellarda · 17 Apr 2011 at 21:32

CaptainCrash said:
A bit of googling suggests the Sky+ box uses a proprietary filesystem, maybe it also uses a GPT protected partition or something similar.

Try cleaning it with the "diskpart" command as follows: Start menu > All programs > Accessories > Command prompt > (Right-click, "Run as administrator"), then enter the following commands:

diskpart

list disk (Lists all physical HDDs, make a note of the new one)

select disk # (where # is the new disk's number, make sure you select the right one!)

clean

exit

You should then be able to partition/format the disk in the normal way - you'll probably get a message saying the disk needs to be re-initialized, select "MBR" as the partition table type.

cheers that worked

thanks everyone else for the responses