Copying Sky HDD

[Blu Ray]

Whilst upgrading the HDDs in my PCs recently, I used Norton Ghost which basically 'cloned' the whole drive including OS and everything. Superb it was, and I was wondering if it would work with a SKy HDD. HAs anyone tried it?

[Nick_UK]

There's nothing special about the Sky HDD. The video files are stored in the same format as on a PC. However, the video files are encrypted, and must be played back through a decoder, as found in the Sky+ box. This is why you can record two programmes at once (whilst watching a third pre-recorded programme), because there's only one decoder in the box, and data is stored directly to disk in encoded format.

[Blu Ray]

Yes, I wan't planning to copy it to watch on the PC or anything. I keep meaning to upgrade the Sky + drive, but there's always a ton of stuff still left to watch on the old one. So, I was wondering if I could copy the old stuff onto the new one but have more space left

[Nick_UK]

I'm not sure you can do that. If you did, there is a strong possibility that the Sky+ box would not be aware of the extra space available. Worth a try though.

[davidcotton]

Why not just get a bigger hard drive and upgrade it so you have more space that way??

[Blu Ray]

That's my plan David. But it seems that, we can never all watch the stuff that's on the old drive before I can upgrade. This is why I wish to port the old stuff onto the new bigger drive. I don't have a DVD recorder on which I can temporarily dump the stuff on either

[Noodle]

I'm also interested in this as I use my + to record a lot of radio.

I don't have a cd-r unit or minidisc so I can't get these recordings off the box. I want to upgrade the HDD without losing these.

Has anybody tried this????

[richard plumb]

one of the things ghost allows is to restore your image to a larger partition later on - you can never be certain you'll be able to buy the exact same HDD after a failure. So you should be able to format and restore a sky HDD to a larger drive.

Surely its worth a try? You won't break anything by plugging the current sky HDD in and doing a ghost to another drive. The original shouldn't be changed at all.

[Noodle]

Yeah, I know, but I'd have to buy the bigger drive in order to do this.

Someone must have tried this when they upgraded.