Transferring settings from Tivo2 to Tivo2

[sameer]

Hello all -- I haven't hacked my Tivo at all, but I hope you can help me. My Series2 Tivo has started freezing up so I called up tech support and they are sending me a replacement. They said I can't transfer all my settings from the old Tivo to the new Tivo, which I am sure is wrong, given what I have heard about how people have been able to get 'bash' shells on their Tivo with full access to the filesystem. Can someone tell me how to transfer my settings from one Tivo to another? Thanks!

[ozzy52]

Get a pencil. Display the settings on your current Tivo. Write them down. Install the new Tivo. Enter the settings you wrote.

[sameer]

Hello Ozzy. Thank you for the enlightened response. I am not referring to the normal settings on the settings page but the detailed settings, such as which programs are set to record, but more importantly, which programs have already been recorded so that shows I have already recorded and watched are not recorded again. I'm sorry if I was not clear in my post.

[ScanMan]

Ozzy's tongue-in-cheek response was sort of correct; there is no way to migrate your settings to a new TiVo without hacking your box. Stuttering/Freezing video is a classic hard drive failure sign. You probably could have just acquired a new hard drive and used MFSTools to back up your old drive and restore to your new one. This would have preserved everything. But since you are getting a new TiVo from the vendor, I'm not sure you want to void the warranty on your new TiVo to perform this operation. You can if you want to...you need to open the TiVos, remove the hard drives, install them in your PC and use MFSTools to backup/restore. Search this site and google Hinsdale upgrade as well.

[cheer]

Keep in mind that if you want to actually back up recordings from an unhacked box, they won't play properly on a different box -- meaning individual piece of hardware, not model. So even if your new Tivo is the exact same model, if you back up your entire drive from the old one (including recordings) and restore to the new drive/Tivo, the recordings will not be viewable.

[sameer]

Hi folks, thanks for the information. I suppose I should have checked here before asking Tivo to send me a replacement, eh? Then I could have upgraded the size of the drive along the way too. I wasn't really worried about watching programs that were already recorded on the old tivo, but thanks for that caveat as well.

-s

[captain_video]

There is a TivoWeb module that will back up your season passes and wishlists but you'll have to hack the Tivo to install and run it. You can download the backup file and transfer it to your new Tivo after hacking it with TivoWebPlus. I don't believe it will preserve all of your settings but a dd clone of the original drive to the new one will do that without any other hacking involved.

[sameer]

OK, now this sucks, the new Tivo they sent me has the same problem! And I paid $50 too! I will call them and see if I can just return the Tivo they sent me and get my $50 back, then I will try to replace the drive on my old tivo using a hacking technique.

[BTUxNine]

OK, now this sucks, the new Tivo they sent me has the same problem! And I paid $50 too! I will call them and see if I can just return the Tivo they sent me and get my $50 back, then I will try to replace the drive on my old tivo using a hacking technique.
If this is a directTivo, make sure there are no stray sources of IR noise (especially things like IR repeaters)