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Does HDD move between Bolts retain shows?

Discussion in 'TiVo Bolt DVR/Streamer' started by hlsteve, Oct 7, 2017.

  1. Oct 7, 2017 #1 of 7
    hlsteve

    hlsteve New Member

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    The High Def signal out of my old TiVo Premier with lifetime subscription was damaged by lightning. I was left with essentially an SD TiVo with lifetime subscription. After a period of mourning, I bought a Bolt off Craigslist and installed a 3TB drive and went on an annual plan. Now, 6 months later, TiVo gave me a deal to transfer my lifetime subscription off the dead Premiere. I took them up on the offer and bought a 500GB Bolt and transferred the lifetime off the Premiere to it.

    My issue is that the "interim Bolt", that does not have lifetime, has the 3TB drive with all my shows on it. I want to move them onto the new Bolt with Lifetime but I don't know for sure how. Can I transfer the HDD to the new Bolt and will the shows come with it? Or, when the HDD is transferred to new bolt hardware, does it automatically reformat? This is obviously not the end of the world I would just like for this transfer to be as seamless as possible.

    Any advice anyone could give is appreciated.
     
  2. Oct 7, 2017 #2 of 7
    sfhub

    sfhub Well-Known Member

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    I don't believe it reformats when you move drives, but for sure the shows won't be viewable on the new Bolt so whether it does or doesn't isn't material. If you have another 3TB drive to put in the new Bolt, you can use TiVo Online to transfer all the shows from the old Bolt to the new Bolt. If you don't have a spare 3TB, you probably need to use a temporary TiVo. For example, transfer the shows from Bolt to Premiere (assuming your premiere has a large drive), the stick the 3TB drive in the new Bolt and do a clear and delete everything. It might be safer to write zeros to the 3TB drive from the old TiVo and have it reformat when you place it in the new Bolt, but the clear and delete everything should work if you want minimal effort.

    Once the 3TB drive is in the new Bolt, you can transfer the shows using TiVo Online, either from the old Bolt of the Premiere, depending on where the shows are.

    You can also manually initiate the show transfers one by one from the Bolt UI, but it is a pain, and much easier to do one TiVo Online, where you can select source TiVo, destination TiVo, then select all shows with a single click, then hit transfer.
     
    Last edited: Oct 7, 2017
  3. Oct 7, 2017 #3 of 7
    atmuscarella

    atmuscarella Well-Known Member

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    No you can not just move the hard drive, it will be reformatted when place in a new TiVo. The only way to do it and also move the hard drive is to move the shows to another TiVo or computer first and then to the new TiVo once you install the larger hard drive.
     
  4. Oct 7, 2017 #4 of 7
    krkaufman

    krkaufman TDL shepherd

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    No, you will NOT be able to simply move the drive between DVRs and retain the content.

    You'll either need to buy a new drive for the new BOLT, or temporarily offload the shows from the old/annual BOLT (to the Premiere or a PC) before moving the 3TB drive to the new BOLT.

    (Or, a bit of a long-shot, contact TiVo to see if you could swap service plans between your BOLTs.)
     
  5. Oct 7, 2017 #5 of 7
    hlsteve

    hlsteve New Member

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    Jun 29, 2003
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    All,
    This is exactly the help I needed. Thank you so much. I had the same idea to use the Premiere. The only issue I have had is that doing it all at once and selecting "all shows" just did not work. The transfer didn't happen. It does work if I select it show-by-show on the interface of the old Premiere. Very slow but it does work. So that will be the approach I will take unless anyone has any ideas why the "all at once" approach using the website just does not seem to work.

    One other question, what does this comment from sfhub mean "It might be safer to write zeros to the 3TB drive from the old TiVo and have it reformat when you place it in the new Bolt". How do I "write zeros" to the drive on the old Bolt? Is there a thread I can read on this?

    One issue the old Bolt has had is that Amazon streaming and Netflix don't work. This is not that big of a deal since I have an Amazon Fire TV. But it is kind of annoying. No sure what I did wrong when I installed the 3TB drive that these streaming services do not seem to work.

    Steve
     
  6. Oct 7, 2017 #6 of 7
    krkaufman

    krkaufman TDL shepherd

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    See this post. (The "write zeroes" test will trigger the TiVo receiving the new drive to reinitialize the drive when it is installed.)

    I'd recommend doing a Clear & Delete Everything on the new BOLT after you've installed the 3TB drive. This seems to be one of the recommended fixes for the streaming apps access problem.
     
  7. Oct 7, 2017 #7 of 7
    sfhub

    sfhub Well-Known Member

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    Did you select Source and Destination TiVos? It is supposed to set up a bunch of items in the ToDo list of the receiving TiVo which will proceed to download one after another.
     

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