Can I take a disk from a HR21 and put it in a HR20...

[BlankMan]

And will all the recorded programs be accessible and everything else work properly?

[the new guy]

Yes, you can move the disk, but no, the programs will not be viewable.

[stevel]

Not only that, but the disk will be reformatted by the HR20.

[BlankMan]

Well I figured I could move the disk the point was to not lose the data.

Can anyone expand the answer as to why not?

And what if, I do an XFS backup of the data on the disk from the HR21 to someplace, put the drive in the HR20 let it be formatted, then take it out and do a XFS restore of my backed up data to it and then put it back in the HR20?

[stevel]

As on DTiVos, the recordings are encrypted with a key based on a serial number on the box's motherboard. The HR2x behavior when it sees a disk that IT didn't write is to reformat it and do the setup so that it can store recordings. Your backup and restore strategy won't work - the HR20 will not see recordings that it wrote and will (at best) reformat the disk again.

If you want to archive, just swap out the disk and store the removed disk for later, but you must put it back in the box it came out of.

[BlankMan]

Thanks Steve.

[BlankMan]

Well, I took the 1TB disk I had put in the HR21 and moved it to the HR20 because I won't be using the HR21 anymore.

As Steve stated, all the recordings were gone, no big deal as the HR21 was only a month old, but to my surprise all my programs that I had set to Record Series were there.

But, I think that turned out to be not good. When I'd go into System Setup and choose Info & Test, I'd get the Please Wait bar up, and it never went away and I was stuck and could not do anything else. I waited 5, 10, 15 minutes, it was stuck, so I had to power cycle it. I waited a while and tried again thinking the newly activated HR20 might be busy doing what ever, same thing happened. Power cycle. Reboot. Tired it one more time. Still turned out to be stuck. Power cycle. Reboot.

Connected the 1TB disk to one of my Linux servers and deleted the partition table on the disk. Powered the HR20 back up, went right in to Info & Test, no problem.

So it appears letting the HR20 set up the disk itself and not use the formatting the HR21 had done corrected what ever the HR20 didn't like about the disk when it tried to do what ever it was doing when it would get stuck.

[TyroneShoes]

...to my surprise all my programs that I had set to Record Series were there...The HD DVR is using some new system of flash ram storage I believe, which is a hybrid system. Some of the settings stay with the DVR and some stay with the HDD. There was a thread about it 6 weeks ago or so, and a report in Broadcast Engineering.