[COLUG] Is the drive dead or not?

[Mike Schoenborn]

>... hdf1 should be 40GB and it shows up as only 9.2GB

If the drive is a Quantum or Maxtor, could it be "locked"?

People that hack TiVo's discovered long ago that some of their drives
have a "locked" mode where the discs will appear to have only 9GB.
Quantum provided a bit of firmware magic in the drive's controller
which TiVo made use of to "lock" the drive at power-down to discourage
people from buying cheap TiVo's for the sole purpose of ripping out the
(then) expensive (then) large drives.

This link has a pointer to a locking/unlocking utility with C source:

http://archive.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=148629

Additional discussion on the topic can be found in alt.video.ptv.tivo, or
Googling on "qunlock" (a prececessor to the utility above).

It's a long shot, but if you're at wit's end, it might be something
to look into before taking the drive apart for its magnets.