Recycling and unlocking a HD DVR hard drive from a DirecTV receiver

Author: Cactus Smoke
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6m 24s Lenght
225 Rating

This video is a tutorial on how to recover or recycle or reclaim a hard drive out of a DirecTV HD DVR receiver such as a HR 20 Or HR 22 as well as several other DVR receivers. I apologize for the shaky video but the instructions are as follows. 1. Disassemble your HD DVR receiver that you intend to recycle and remove the hard drive. 2. Try plugging the hard drive into a computer via SATA to USB. if the drive spins and starts and can be reformatted then congratulations you can end the tutorial here. however if your drive does not spin or show any signs of life it may not necessarily be dead. Continue the tutorial to see if you can fix this problem. 3. plug the drive back into the receiver and power the receiver on. if the drive spins up eventually then the drive still good. 4.(minimum requirement) you will need Ubuntu Linux on a live USB flash drive 5.At this point you need to "hot-swap" the SATA cable and plug it into your SATA to USB. 6.open a command terminal window and type sudo su 7.open Gparted and select the drive. 8. go back to the command terminal and type in the following. hdparm -s0 /dev/sdc making sure that /dev/sdc matches the drive that you want to alter. and then press enter. 9. congratulations the drive is now unlocked and you can plug it into anything you would like. You may now also format the drive in Gparted or take it back into any operating system you would like format. You can also go ahead and poke around in the files at this point before you formatted if you would like. Summary and Explanation DirecTV and other companies alter a setting on their dvr receiver hard drives to make it harder for people to reclaim the hard drive and/or alter or retrieve files from the hard drive. the setting you have changed allows the hard drive to initialize or spin up immediately upon being power rather than waiting for a command to do so (standby). If you would like to know more about hdparm and what it can do, simply go into your terminal and type in man hdparm and it will bring up a manual of all the things it can do. I apologize for the poor video quality but after researching on YouTube to try to find this solution and coming up dry I decided to make a tutorial for those of you that would like to do this. ** USB 2.0 to IDE SATA S-ATA 2.5 3.5 Hard Drive HD HDD Converter Adapter Cable http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Adapter-Converter-Optical-External/dp/B001OORMVQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1421494692&sr=8-1&keywords=USB+2.0+to+IDE+SATA+S-ATA+2.5+3.5+Hard+Drive+HD+HDD+Converter+Adapter+Cable https://datarecovery.com/rd/how-to-unlock-dvr-hard-drives-for-normal-use-directv-dish-network/

Comments

  1. Too bad you couldn't get the videos off that drive.
  2. I pulled a 160 gb hdd from a TiVo box. It was unlocked and it spun up upon powering my pc up. Copied some files and its good
  3. why wouldn't you make it easy on yourself and use windows with a good partition program.
  4. plz I need help.
    I can't seem to get the /dev/sdc command right. gparted said it was sdb or sdb1 and neither worked. and I can't figure out what goes where dev is.
  5. so i guess hookin it up as a slave drive in windows is worthless?
  6. I can't seem to get ubuntu to recognize it. Windows would and let me repartition it, but it won't stay running
  7. I bought a couple of these boxs at a yard sale hoping to use the hard drive in them. but I don't have a clue how to. can you help me with this ??
  8. Do You know anything about the old Gridcase laptop computers? How do I run this antique?
  9. what if I do want to recover my movies and tv shows? Can I do that, if so how?
  10. This process worked like a charm! Thanks for putting this up.
  11. I gotta try this one day
  12. Huston We Have A Problem. Trying the process and somewhere along something went wrong. Trying to restart my computer only find that my c: drive is not recognized after trying to do a recovery windows tells me my drive is now locked!!! any ideas how to unlock the drive?
  13. can you just use the window 7 disk utility? i would imagine you could, unless im missing something.
  14. nice job , i have the same hard drive just the drive and its protected with a password is this method gonna work i want just to use it on my desktop
    thanks
  15. totally salvaging drives now. .. these things are 500gb and not cheap!
  16. Must say i been looking for firmwares and unlocking through hex and all that stuff for a few months now. got one of the pipeline hd hard drives 2tb out of an old dish hopper and this is the only one that worked :) called dish to see if it could be used for there service and they said the account attached to it last was on bad standing and to just recycle it or ship it to them if i felt like paying shipping. so i just pulled the drive. $10 purchase at a yardsale paid off :) very happy thanks alot.
  17. connect hdd internally in windows xp 7 8 10 open cmd as admin type
    diskpart
    list disk
    select disk # this will be the number of the disk listed example select disk 0 make sure you know the capacity of the dtv hdd
    clean
    create partition primary
    select partition 1
    format fs=ntfs .if you want to do a quick format use format fs=ntfs quick
    i like a full format! now we need to assign a drive letter type
    assign hit inter and exit your done enjoy your new hard drive
  18. Where do you find those boxes? I only find old Dell computers with 40GB ATA drives :(