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Unlock DVR Hard Drives for Normal Use: A Guide
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January 11, 2016
We recently came across something we hadn’t seen before with
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a couple hard drives, both from DirecTV DVR/receiver systems. When put into a normal computer, they would not spin up or
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power on. However, the drives’ owner told us that they still
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worked fine in their original DirecTV DVR. There was some
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aspect of the drives that required the host to be the DVR for them to work. The owner just wanted to reclaim or re-purpose
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them for another use since he no longer used the DVRs (he had since upgraded to a fancy new DirecTV box). Curious, we had an engineer investigate ways to unlock DVR hard drives.
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Our engineer found the drives had the Power-up in Standby (PUIS), or power
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management 4
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mode (PM4),
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enabled in the hard disk
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configuration. When this mode is enabled, the disk will not
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automatically automatically spin up when power is applied. It would only spin
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up later, when issued an ATA command. This made sense, as SEARCH
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how else would the drive know if it were in a DirecTV DVR
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system? It would need to be powered on in some way to allow for communication. This feature can be used byRecovery equipment manufacturers as a RAID Data About Contact power management method to save a little energy and to avoid
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power spikes when multiple components are powered on at once. You can read more about it here in the working draft of the ATA standard (see section 4.16 on page 38).
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This document describes interactions with a device that
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implements Power-up in Standby and the related commands. Most importantly for us, it details how the PUIS feature can be
SAN
disabled using the SET FEATURES command.
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The relevant
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Commands for PUIS feature set include:
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• Feature: 0x06 (Enable PUIS)
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• Feature: 0x86 (Disable PUIS)
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• Feature: 0x07 (Spin up drive after power on) • Command: 0xEF (Set feature) The key to allowing regular usage of these hard drives is to disable Power-up in Standby. The tricky part is gaining access to
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issue commands on the drive. There are two ways to do this.
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One includes using the original DirecTV or Dish Network box to
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allow for the drive to power on and spin up. The other method
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does not require the DVR box. That’s the method we’ll focus on
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here, since our engineer did not have access to the original DVR
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hardware. Plus, y’know, it’s more MacGuyver-y that way.
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Unlock DVR Hard Drives for Normal Use: A Guide | Datarecovery.com
To keep things as simple as possible, and to allow for others to SEARCH a
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method using open source software. The steps below outline the process to disable the Power-up in Standby behavior of a hard drive, thereby enabling its use in a general purpose computer. About
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make the same changes, our engineer developed a workaround
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Please note that, to complete this process, the hard drive needs to remain powered on at all times, as the actual device
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configuration change occurs in the last step in the sequence.
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You’ve probably already guessed this, but you should also note
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that completing this process will make it so that the drive in question will no longer work in your DirecTV or Dish Network
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DVR, or whichever device it was originally in.
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You will need to create these two bootable CDs: • GParted Live bootable CD • HDAT2 bootable CD
Steps to Disable PUIS on your DirecTV DVR Hard Drive: 1. Insert the GParted CD in the computer you’ll use and power off the computer. 2. Connect the DVR hard drive to your computer with power and SATA data cables (you may use a SATA to USB adapter). 3. Start the computer and boot to the GParted CD (you may need to change the boot device order in BIOS, or you could just make sure your OS drive is unplugged). 4. In GParted, select the first option. Select the second option to avoid loading keyboard options. Enter your
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language info. Use the first option for graphics info. Then SEARCH b
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hit “Enter” through three screens.
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5. You should be at a screen showing hard drive info. Double-click the red “X” at top left. Select reboot. Then the
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GParted CD will be ejected when it begins to shut down. RAID Data Recovery About Contact Immediately replace the CD with the HDAT2 CD.
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6. Boot to the HDAT2 CD. 7. Select the first option. 8. In the command prompt, type HDAT2. 9. After HDAT2 starts, select the drive you are working on and hit “Enter”. 10. Select “Device Configuration Overlay (DCO) menu”. Then, at the bottom, select “Restore”. Hit “Y” to continue and it will provide some output. 11. Hit “Escape” to return to the original menu where you see “Commands Menu,” and select that. Choose “commands/feature sets.” Find the “Power-Up In Standby (PUIS)” item and highlight it. Hit the right arrow key, then the “S” key. Type “Y” at the prompt. Assure the process completes without any errors, and the PUIS item should change to disabled. The drive should now be unlocked, ready to be partitioned and used as a regular hard drive. It will spin up just fine next time it’s powered on.
Alternate Method: Using the Original DVR to Unlock The Drive If you do have your original DVR device, that can be used instead. The drive is powered up using the DVR device, allowing the spin up ATA command to be sent by the DVR. Now, it’s ready to have the configuration changed. After that, swap the SATA data cable from the DVR to your computer (while it is running,
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called “hot swap”), SEARCH where you can toggle the PUIS setting of the a
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We found this Youtube video which describes the process pretty
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This page can’t • Make sure the web address https://www.youtu • Look for the page with your search engine. • Refresh the page in a few minutes.
Summary
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How to Learn how to take the hard drive from an old DVR and use it however you want.
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Edwardsville, IL | Pleasanton, CA | Phoenix, AZ | Toronto, ON Canada
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