Jeff Layman wrote:
I've read somewhere that PVR HDs have a setup of their own -
particularly one which used to avoid error checking as it took too long
when writing to the disk. Does gparted get round this, or is it possibly
integral to the disk controller?

It's inside the disc. gparted doesn't touch that, but it's only likely to
come into play if you are doing large amounts of writing - in the way that
a security camera does. Most of the time an AV drive will be fine, although
I would be wary about storing valuable data on it.

My guess would be the OP has formatted the HDD as bootable in some way that's
confusing the boot process.

If in doubt, a complete wipe (with dd or a similar tool) should erase any
partition tables on it, and then just make a new partition table from
scratch.

Theo