Anyway to stick HDs from one Dtivo into another without clearing them?

[rmcelwee]

I have a dtivo that won't pick up a signal. Can I pull drives from one dtivo and stick them in another? I've heard there is some sort of signature on the drives but there must be a way to copy it. Thanks...

[captain_video]

You have to do a clear and delete everything to use a drive in another DTivo. AFAIK there's no way around this since the Tivo service No. and other data is contained on the mainboard. When you put in a foreign DTivo drive it checks the info to see if it matches. If it doesn't, you'll get an error #51. I have no idea if there is any way to edit this info on a DTivo drive and I've never seen a post that discusses doing it.

You'll lose all your recordings, season passes, and personal settings so you'll have to run guided setup all over again and reset all season passes. If you need to send your DTivo in for service there's a couple of recommended service centers in the How Tos Only sticky thread in the DirecTV Tivo Hacking forum. You might want to try extracting the shows to your PC. This will only work if you've got noscramble.o loaded on the DTivo drive. Any recordings made with scrambling turned on cannot be extracted.

[tgun]

It can't be done. I've been through this several times when my power supplies went south. I even called Sony tech support and they told me the same thing. "Clear and delete everything" does just what it says, but at least your drives(s) can be reused.