format a locked harddrive with linux

[Kareem Shehata]

On Fri, 2004-07-16 at 12:43, Aaron Sorensen wrote:
> the harddrive itsself works fine i had it working with my xbox and now
> my xbox brok and since its locked it only worked with that xboxes
> motherboard and no its usless but i herd the linux formater could do it
> and i wanted to see if it was possible

Now I understand what you're going on about.  I kept looking at this
thread and thinking that "I don't know anything about xbox so i can't
help this guy", but if you're trying to set up a drive in Linux then
there are some things that can be done.

First, boot up linux either from an install on another drive or one of
the Live CD's (knoppix comes to mind).  Then, get yourself a root prompt
and try the following:

# dmesg | less

and look for the lines where the kernel finds your harddrive.  It might
have some interesting things to say.

# fdisk -l /dev/hda
(or hdb, hdc, hdd depending on where the drive is installed.  hda is the
primary master, while hdd is the secondary slave)

If the drive can be read at all, then this will show the partition
table.  If it shows anything sensible, then you can at the very least
wipe out the xbox partition and make a new one for whatever you want.

If not, then the drive has to be low-level formatted.  I haven't done
that in Linux, though I'm sure there's a tool to do it.  Any ideas from
the list?

Good luck!

Kareem
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