I just reclaimed mine this morning after upgrading to a new 120GB drive. I simply re-connected the original drive, powered on the machine, waited about 3 minutes then unplugged the IDE cable but left the power connected. At that point you can hear the drive writing. Came back about 30 minutes later and the drive was idle, so I powered it down, put it into my PC, and the PC recognized and formatted it.
The key here is that the UTV box remembers the last drive it was using. When you connect anything other than the last drive, it reformats the drive and writes the security information to the drive at the end of the process. By unplugging the IDE cable AFTER the format command is underway, you prefent UTV from securing the drive. Obviously it is important to leave the power connected to the drive so the format can complete. Once the drive goes idle it is ready to be installed in your PC.
Since the security process was never completed, the UTV box still sees the previously connect hard drive (in my case, the new 120GB drive) as the authorized drive, so it does not try to reformat it when you put it all back together. Thus, the order of operations are as follows:
1. Remove original drive and replace with your new drive.
2. Let UTV download and install the OS.
3. Once everything is working with the new drive, disconnect everything and reinstall the original drive.
4. Power up the system, and after a couple of minutes disconnect the IDE from the original drive, and allow time for the format to complete.
5. Remove the original drive from the system, and re-install the new drive.
6. The system will not try to re-initialize the new drive since we already did that in step 2.
Worked perfectly for me this morning.
Good luck.