copy season passes & programs to new tivo

[zimm0who0net]

OK, I'm the guy who had a tivo motherboard die on him, leaving me with a perfectly good working hard drive.
I called TiVo and I'm replacing the TiVo with a referbished one (and preserving my lifetime subscription). However, I now have a perfectly good TiVo hard drive with all my stored programs, season passes, program thumbs up/down, channel preferences, etc. and I'd REALLY like to keep those.
Ideally I'd like to just drop the old hard drive into the new TiVo and cross my fingers, but I've been told that it wouldn't work. Alternatively, is there a list of files I can copy over, or partitions I can 'dd' copy from the old hard drive to the new and preserve everything?

[Dan203]

Can't be done! The programs stored on your old hard drive are encrypted with a key that is stored on a crypto chip on the motherboard of your old unit. They're useless without that motherboard.

The best you can do is format the drive and use it to double the storage in your new TiVo.

Dan

[zimm0who0net]

Hmmmm. Shucks.. What about the configuration database (i.e. program thumbs rating, channel preferences, season passes, etc).

[Guindalf]

Nope - same applies. The hard drive will not work in its current form at all. As Dan said, best bet is to go to the TiVo Upgrade forum and get the tools and instructions to upgrade your replacement box and use the extra HD for increased storage.

[zimm0who0net]

I completely understand why they would encrypt the programming, but it seems odd to me that they would encrypt the meta-data database. I might try messing with this a little once the new system comes in. Maybe copy over the MFS partitions and see what happens...