Gaming Fixing HDD for DVD recorder

[Hielkenator]

This will be hard to explain...

I own a sharp HDD/DVD recorder.
The HDD died a few days ago.
After some research I found out you can swap the hdd drives.

I formatted a HDD to fat 32.
Put it inside and the thing booted.
According to sharp I have to perform HDD aging, in order to set the HDD-ID.

During these steps I screwed up. The manual says when in error replace HDD and start over.
I am trying to get acces to the HDD on my PC again in order to reformat, but it seems the HDD recorder has written it's own format.

As a result the drive is'nt recognized anymore
Are there any windows based tools to get acces to this drive to do a format?
OR can I throw this drive to the bin?

 

[FAST6191]

If it has just repartitioned it to a format it wants then that is easy enough. Personally I like to redo partitions with gparted ( http://gparted.sourceforge.net/ but the program is also included in most linux liveCDs and such, there is also parted magic ( http://partedmagic.com/doku.php?id=start ) if you like things a bit friendlier however windows does have the option in diskmgmt.msc (should be the same for XP, vista and 7- start, run, add the command, press run/enter) which should then allow you to see your disc- it will probably look something like

(from http://technet.micro...y/dd163558.aspx )
Right click on the drive in question in the lower part of the window if it is there and it should allow you to delete and remake partitions.

If it is not there (and what you have said suggests it might be) you still have options- most drive manufacturers have programs to try and punch the drive into working again and many are bundled in the likes of UBCD ( http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ ) and hiren's ( http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd ) both of which are disks I suggest you have a copy of if you fix computers.

After this you can try one of the data/drive recovery firms but in general those guys operate somewhat apart from the rest of computing (modern drives have all sorts of controllers, flash/EEPROM memory, onboard JTAG and whatnot that you get to play with) and charge a fortune or you can go down the very iffy path of drive motherboard replacement (so many revisions and things to account for usually renders it not worth it).