Cannot return my hard drive to original formatting

[123.Sharik]

Hi,

I registered an external hard drive on my Sony TV, not realising I would not be able to use it anymore on my PC. I have been searching the internet for solutions to change it back to it's original formatting as I use it principally with PCs but anything I have tried has not worked.  It is not recognised on a computer, the only trace of it is under Disk Management but there is "no media" under the title and no partitions etc. visible.  The only change I seem to be able to make in Disk Management is the drive letter. 

Can anyone help?  I will need to buy a new removable hard drive if I cannot restore the function to this one

[Bravia55HX]

Hi

this has been a bit of a grey area for some time now with many people with this issue and i have stumbled, for want of a better word on something that has never been mentioned.

heres what i would like you to try-

on your remote press menu, scroll to system settings, then go to recording set up, press that and you should see HDD De-registration (with the drive plugged in) press the button and see what happens, i cant do this as i dont have one!, it should tell you if the drive has been de registered, once done please report back here whether you were successful in getting your pc to format it back to what you want.

[123.Sharik]

HI,

I had given this a go, and it appeared to have been de-registered because it would no longer work on tv  without re-registering but there was no change when I plugged it back into the laptop.  Weird.  At the very least people should be warned that "registering" means a bit more than that !  These removable hard drives can be expensive

[Bravia55HX]

Hi,

well it wa just a thought, and you are correct people should be made more aware, it seems to me that no one wants to look into this further particularly the guys from Sony themselves, this is a much more widespread problem than originally thought.

i wish i could insist that the guys at Sony uk would contact their Sony HQ in Japan and finally get some answers for us.

[mithcd]

Hi 123.Sharik. I think you need to call tech support on this and check you options.

[Nielsen]

I have a WD HDD connected to my Bravia, and had no trouble in accessing this drive using Ubuntu booting from a CD on my PC without de-registration of the HDD first. I would guess it's possible to delete both content and formatting using Ubuntu this way and reset the HDD, but I haven't tried that yet since I still got some recordings I don't want to delete.

However, the de-registration process is supposed to make the HDD available for PC use, cause it states that clearly in the I-manual. If that's not working it's a clear flaw imo.:smileyconfused: