Hard Drive Swapping between two Tivos, simple right?

[CorranHorn]

Hi All,

This is my first post here in the forums, but I've found a lot of great knowledge on this site in the last year or so when I first came across it.

In the next couple of weeks, I'm going to be getting two series 1 Tivos, one of which is glitchy, apparently during playback the recording pauses for a few seconds, then fast forwards to catch up. The problem could possibly be in the hard drive of this box, perhaps it needs a reformat. But before I goto that extreme, I want to try to just take the hard drive from the glitchy Tivo and install it onto the functional Tivo, to see if it will record and then playback without the glitch, thus ruling out the disk as the problem.

I've found a lot of info in regards to how easy it is to install an off the shelf hard drive into a Tivo, but I've not found any info about putting a hard drive from one Tivo into another. Does any work need to be done, outside of the physical install, to get the Tivo box to recognize a hard drive from another Tivo box? It would seem to me, that so long as the hard drive already has the O/S on it, the Tivo should believe it to be it's own disk. Am I right in that assumption or is there going to be more to it?

Also I was curious to know, is the lifetime subscription of a Tivo linked to the Tivo box itself, or the O/S install on the hard drive?

Thanks in advance!

[RMaddog]

You are right in assuming that just switching the HDD out between the Tivo's. However, if you plan on leaving the drive in the Tivo you switched to, you will need to insure the O/S one one drive is the same ver as the other. If it's not when it makes it's call to Tivo it may not update itself.

Yes the lifetime subscription is linked to the Tivo's mac address and not the O/S .

[CorranHorn]

You are right in assuming that just switching the HDD out between the Tivo's. However, if you plan on leaving the drive in the Tivo you switched to, you will need to insure the O/S one one drive is the same ver as the other. If it's not when it makes it's call to Tivo it may not update itself.

Yes the lifetime subscription is linked to the Tivo's mac address and not the O/S .

so if the two HD's have different versions of the O/S, only one HD should actually be hooked up to the box? sounds reasonable.

thanks for the help!

[Gillies]

i recommend going to www.weaknees.com ull find all the info u need there

[sync]

See the first 'sticky' at the Tivo upgrade forum:
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/forumdisplay.php?f=25

[CorranHorn]

after videohelp, weaknees was the next site I went to, and while it does have a lot of great info in regards to swapping out an existing HD with a brand new one, I couldn't (and still can't) find info about swapping existing HD's between two Tivo boxes. otherwise, it's a great site. thanks!