# Transfer hard drive to new TiVo?



## stoli412 (Nov 22, 2003)

I'm upgrading from a Premiere to a Premiere 4. Is it possible to transfer or clone my hard drive and put it in the new TiVo so I don't lose all my recordings and thumbs info? I'm pretty comfortable with cloning/upgrading a hard drive for use in the same TiVo, but I've never needed to transfer one to a new TiVo.

Specifically I have a Premiere with a self-upgraded 1 TB drive, and I'm upgrading to a Premiere 4 along with a new 2 TB drive. So I've got a lot of things going on and not sure what's possible and in what order things need to be done. Any help is appreciated!


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

No, you cannot move a drive from any Tivo to another and preserve recordings. When you install a drive that is from another Tivo, you have to run Clear & Delete Everything to marry the Tivo to the drive.

You can, however, transfer the recordings (as long as its not copy protected) to the new Tivo, after its been subscribed (both need to be subscribed) and Transfers allowed under DVR Preferences (can take up to 24 hrs to activate).


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## stoli412 (Nov 22, 2003)

Thanks for the reply. That's what I feared. I just wish TiVo would provide a way to at least transfer season passes and years of thumbs data.


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

You can on tivo.com, after you have logged in, there is a season pass manager.


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## stoli412 (Nov 22, 2003)

Oh wow! I have NEVER seen that season pass transfer feature before! Thanks...at least that's something.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

For those recordings not sabotaged by the anti-copy bit, if you transfer (copy, actually, the original remains on the source TiVo as long as it would otherwise) from source TiVo to PC (with the free version of TiVo Desktop, at least, others can chime in about the other 3rd party open source stuff), more of the metadata is preserved when you then copy from PC to target TiVo than if you go straight from TiVo to TiVo.

Stuff like the actual date the recording was made rather than the date the copying was done.

Before I knew that I went TiVo to TiVo and wound up with about a month's worth of Charlie Rose episodes which now all have the same date.


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## Soapm (May 9, 2007)

What would be nice is if you could just clone the MFS partitions to the new drive.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

Soapm said:


> What would be nice is if you could just clone the MFS partitions to the new drive.


Have you ever tried?

As long as the partition map is the same, unexpanded or expanded exactly the same, you should be able to "Xerox" individual partitions and overwrite, like

dd_rescue /dev/sda11 /dev/sdb11


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## Soapm (May 9, 2007)

unitron said:


> Have you ever tried?
> 
> As long as the partition map is the same, unexpanded or expanded exactly the same, you should be able to "Xerox" individual partitions and overwrite, like
> 
> dd_rescue /dev/sda11 /dev/sdb11


I'm no technical expert but if I recall partition 10 has some identifying information and would be the critical partition to make this work since I believe it knows where the recordings are but it also has the TSN etc... It would be nice if I'm wrong.


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## ggieseke (May 30, 2008)

In this case the encryption would make them unplayable anyway.


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## jmbach (Jan 1, 2009)

Soapm said:


> I'm no technical expert but if I recall partition 10 has some identifying information and would be the critical partition to make this work since I believe it knows where the recordings are but it also has the TSN etc... It would be nice if I'm wrong.





ggieseke said:


> In this case the encryption would make them unplayable anyway.


I believe you all are correct. One could try and see what the outcome would be. Depending on how each instance how the tsn is encoded, one might be able to use a hex editor and do a search for the old tsn and replace it with the new tsn. I do know that there are many instances of the tsn in plain text. I do not know if it is encoded any differently. One could try and the only thing that would be lost is time. Of course only work on a copy of the drive when doing this and not the original. Would have to copy both MFS app and media partitions to make it work.


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## videobruce (Nov 30, 2012)

> When you install a drive that is from another Tivo, you have to run Clear & Delete Everything to marry the Tivo to the drive.


From all the reading I have done, I had the impression you can't just xfer a drive to another TiVo since the drive is married to the MB and would/could problems with the 2nd machine.

If I may ask, do you have a source for this?


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

videobruce said:


> From all the reading I have done, I had the impression you can't just xfer a drive to another TiVo since the drive is married to the MB and would/could problems with the 2nd machine.
> 
> If I may ask, do you have a source for this?


Each TiVo motherboard has a TiVo Service Number.

That's the number to which the account/subscription status is attached in the TiVo, Inc., databases, and that's the number to which recordings made on that machine are tied.

If you put an image from a different TiVo of the same model on a drive, it has the old machine's TSN stored in there somewhere, and if you boot the drive in a new machine, it sees the mismatch and throws an error 51 and wants to do a Clear and Delete Everything and re-run Guided Setup.

If you just pull a drive from another TiVo of the same model, same thing in a different TiVo, but any recordings on the drive (which are tied to the old machine's TSN) get wiped so that when all the dust settles, there's nothing in the Now Playing List anymore.


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