Recovering programs from dead Tivo

[SciFiTechGuy]

I have an upgraded HDVR2 that's worked fine for years until recently when it seems to have died. Plug the power cable and nothing, no lights, no video, nada. The fan doesn't spin, and the hard drive is silent. Just a faint clicking sound coming from the power supply - like a power relay trying to close. The clicking noise is amplified by the SOUND OUT into my AV receiever too. When I pull the drive, it works fine in a PC.

I've purchased another HDVR2 on e-Bay, and swapped the power supplies, but no luck. I even swapped out all components but the main board, and now it's looking like the mainboard is the culprit.

So assuming it's truly dead, is there any way to recover the programs on the 120 GB drive? I've read that the content is somehow locked to the mainboard via some encryption module. But I have over 100 hours of programming that I'd like to recover. Anyone have any ideas, or am I SOL?

[captain_video]

There's a method of extracting the video directly from the drive by installing it in your PC. Look in the extraction forum and you'll find a sticky thread on the subject. If you can get the drive up and running in another HDVR2 then you should be able to extract the videos using any of the extraction tools like TyTools or mfs_ftp. You'll get an error #51 message that will prevent your new DTivo from playing back the videos and you will need to either perform a Clear & Delete Everything or intsall and run 51killer.tcl to correct the problem but you may lose your recordings in the process. I'd recommend installing the drive in the replacement HDVR2 and taking it from there.