I have successfully booted up a Linux live CD (or DVD) and made copies of the encrypted programs or moved them from one Dish-formatted disk to another. That works, though you must maintain the ownership of the files as root.
I also installed ext2fsd on my Windows computer with success. Note that, since these program files are encrypted, you can't watch them without a Dish receiver.
Don't be too sure about that. Linux has come a long way and it has multiple nice GUI's to help you out and keep you (and me) from goofing everything up.
So I finally got around to connecting the external hard drives that I had connected to my old 722. They all worked fine on the 722, but when I connected several of them to the Hopper with Sling I get the message that they need to be reformatted. Some of them connected and work fine, others say they need reformatting. I was hoping not to lose the data that is on those hard drives, is there anything else I can do? They are all WD drives, either 1TB or 2TB drives. Thanks for any information you may have.
Lucky you! At least it saw the drives. I have tried two different 2TB HDDs to my HWS and I get no messages of any kind no matter how long I leave them attached. One was a Seagate drive and the other was/is a WD drive. I have cold reset the HWS many times with no results. My DVR is filling up!