Getting old shows from Hopper 3

[Garrettkjr]

Newbie here and I just discovered this forum. We have a Hopper 3 and DSL modem get knocked out by lightning this week. Hopper doesn’t power up at all, so I’m thinking the content on the hard drive is still there. I thought about putting the old hard drive into the new Hopper, then transferring the content to an external hard drive. Then putting the new hard drive back in the new Hopper and transferring the content into the new Hopper. Is there a better way to do this? And when I say better, I mean cheaper because once this is done, I don’t really need the extra space of an external hard drive. I’m not a computer guy with a bunch of hard drives laying around so I would have to buy a hard drive to perform this task. I’m in Hampton, Georgia (south of Atlanta) if anybody wants to loan me a hard drive. Time is of the essence since I have to send the old Hopper back in the next week or so.

 

[Jim5506]

The caveat to swapping the hard drives, even temporarily is that the drives have a tamper seal on them and they can tell if you have removed the drive and will charge you the full price of the unit if they feel you tampered with it.
If you can connect the old drive to the new DVR without physically removing any drives from their chassis, that might work.

 

[Garrettkjr]

I saw that tamper tape at first and thought I was sunk, but that tape is on the drive and the little chassis that holds the drive. So what I did was take the old drive out with the little chassis that it rides in, and the tape was not disturbed. I think the tape is to keep you from replacing the drive with one not from a Hopper. That means that you would have to remove the drive from that chassis, thereby disturbing the tamper tape.

 

[Howard Simmons]

Newbie here and I just discovered this forum. We have a Hopper 3 and DSL modem get knocked out by lightning this week. Hopper doesn’t power up at all, so I’m thinking the content on the hard drive is still there. I thought about putting the old hard drive into the new Hopper, then transferring the content to an external hard drive. Then putting the new hard drive back in the new Hopper and transferring the content into the new Hopper. Is there a better way to do this? And when I say better, I mean cheaper because once this is done, I don’t really need the extra space of an external hard drive. I’m not a computer guy with a bunch of hard drives laying around so I would have to buy a hard drive to perform this task. I’m in Hampton, Georgia (south of Atlanta) if anybody wants to loan me a hard drive. Time is of the essence since I have to send the old Hopper back in the next week or so.

Don't have any help to give you but "Welcome" to the website. Hope you get your problem solved.

 

[pattykay]

I saw that tamper tape at first and thought I was sunk, but that tape is on the drive and the little chassis that holds the drive. So what I did was take the old drive out with the little chassis that it rides in, and the tape was not disturbed. I think the tape is to keep you from replacing the drive with one not from a Hopper. That means that you would have to remove the drive from that chassis, thereby disturbing the tamper tape.

Yeah, I don't think Dish really cares about that tamper tape. I recently took apart my purchased ViP612 that died, in a last-ditch effort to try to get it to boot up properly (just in case it was a problem with the old hard drive that was causing it to crash). That tamper tape was attached to the chassis, but only barely attached to the drive itself, so I was able to peel it off quite easily. I then replaced the hard drive, and stuck the tape back down just the way it had been stuck on the old drive. Of course, Dish may have been more careful with that tamper tape on the leased units, but it doubt it. I highly doubt that the people who refurbish these receivers are even aware of which ones are going to be leased again, and which ones will be available for purchase. That is probably more of a "first-come, first-served" situation, with the ownership status of each individual receiver being unknown until it is actually added to an account.

 

[Jim5506]

There is a world of difference between Dish's attitude toward tampering with an obsolete ViP612 and a Hopper 3.

 

[Garrettkjr]

I swapped the hard drives and sure enough, all content is there and readable. I ordered a WD Blue hard drive and Sabrent USB enclosure from Amazon. I’ll let you know how it goes when they arrive.

 

[Garrettkjr]

It didn’t go so well. The new hard drive and enclosure arrived today. I connected the external hard drive to make sure everything was working fine with it. The Hopper recognized it and reformatted it. I put the old hard drive into the Hopper. Everything seemed fine. Old shows were there, but there was an error when trying to transfer them to the external hard drive. When I tried to view a show, it wouldn’t work either even though it worked fine the other day. I restarted the Hopper. The start up screen was there, then it got stuck and wouldn’t finish booting up. I tried several times with the same result. I put the new hard drive back in the Hopper and it booted right up. Somehow the old hard has been corrupted (possibly from the lightning strike) and the Hopper will not boot up with the old hard drive.