Someone I work with is pretty bummed out.  He purchased an HR10-250 when they were $1000 each and he has loved it for the last two years.

Recently, it rebooted and was stuck at the Welcome powering up screen.  I told him it was probably a dead hard drive.  He was POed because there are recordings on it he really wants.

I know it is the hard drive because he brought the unit into work today and I brought it home, opened it up and couldn't get it past the Welcome screen.  I did a quick test by disconnecting the mounted hard drive and hooking up the 250GB hard drive from the HR10-250 I upgraded to a 500GB drive.  Of course, the unit booted all the way up, got satellite signal and tuned Universal HD, ESPN HD, ESPN 2 HD, etc.

Question is as follows:  Can I take the 250GB hard drive I removed from my TiVo, clone a new hard drive (300GB spare) from it without expanding the partitions and then take his hard drive and copy the MFS partitions to the new clone using dd to save the recordings?  I seem to remember that the disk key is stored in MFS so the decryption with the crypto chip on his machine should still decrypt his recordings.

 Am I on the right track?  I suspect he might want me to upgrade the drive while I'm at it so I could clone my 250GB drive to a spare 300GB, save his recordings and then use mfslive to upgrade to a 500GB or 750GB drive.