How can I use a Sky+ Hard drive in pc

[Ferret141]

Well the story is a friend of mine has Sky+ and wanted to expand his capacity so he buys a 250GB drive which is already formatted or whatever to work in a Sky+ box from some dodgy guys who offered to install it but I offered to do it for him for free, they were going to charge him shed loads for an in and out job. Well anyway once I installed it and check it was working with his Sky+ box. So at the end he said I could have the old 40GB Maxtor D540X-4K that was in his box.

Well anyway I originally thought it was just a regular NTFS format (which I found it isn't till I cam here) so I plunked it in my pc and it wasn't being picked up.
So that is my predicament. I would like to use it in my PC as opposed to what most people here want to do and use a PC hard-drive in their Sky+ boxes :p:

[zing_deleted]

right click my comp select manage and disk management. The drive should be seen there as unknown partition just delete the partitions and create a new one (be sure its the right one ;))

:welcome:

[christopherw]

The reason it doesn't initially show up is because the SkyDigital box encrypts the entire volume so you can't just drag and drop the MPEG files off it ;) As zingle said, reformatting the entire volume will solve it.

[Ferret141]

Thanks alot for replying but I thought of that and tried looking at it in disk management but I couldn't find anything as unknown or similar. Might be my bios is a bit lame, it's an ASrock board so figuires. I'll try it in another pc of mine

[zing_deleted]

well the 40 gig one that was in my original sky+ plus box got sold with xp on it so its possible lol try booting from windows cd and delete the partition there

[Paul K]

Does it actually see the drive in the BIOS when you boot up?

[Ferret141]

That's the thing. It doesn't so I'm guessing my friend manhandled the drive or the AMI bios is swag. Haven't tried it in another pc yet due to me being busy

[zing_deleted]

jumper setting?

[Ferret141]

Cable Select. It was on the slave channel as well. I'll try on CS and Slave when I get round to testing it in another PC.

[lincsat]

Try it with Master or Slave, tend to work better than Cable select. You can go to the Maxtor website and download their Dos utilities and boot the PC from that - you will then get the option to re-format and setup the disc from there.