[deanlef]

I have a Thomson sky+ hd box that I put a 1tb hdd in and works fine. Hi understand Thomson boxes can't work with anytime. I have acquired a working samsung 250gb hd 3d box. if i swap the drives so the Samsung gets the 1tb, will my recorded progs still be accessable?

this should allow me to get anytime.

anything I should be wary of?

[Masteriser]

It will not work as you plan because the Samsung HD box reads and writes data to the hard disk in a different way (all non Thomson HD boxes now use this format which is known as Darwin). There was a time when a non Darwin hard disk (ie one from a Thomson) would be converted to the new format on initial boot up but a software update from Sky has removed this now.

However, help is at hand. You can download and use the ExPVR software to copy from one format to another (non Darwin to Darwin). The only snag is that it appears that you want to use the same 1TB hard disk. So to overcome this you will need to copy the programmes you want to save to another hard drive first (maybe your PC's drive if there is the space?). Then copy these back to the original 1 TB disk which will now be prepared in the new format. I think there is a charge for this function with ExPVR (£10.00 I believe).

This guide to upgrading the HDD in a Samsung might be useful to you too.

You will also need to call Sky and tell them you have swapped to the new box so they can transfer your account to the Samsung and activate the recording functions on it.

Best of luck.

[mrmt32]

That wasn't actually possible yesterday, but I have just released a beta update which enables copies from Thompson boxes. The free version will work fine (you only need the paid one if you are extracting recordings to view on your PC, copying to a disk image isn't a problem).

If you do copy to an image and then back to the same drive, do make sure all of the recordings copied successfully before copying the image back (I have tested copies between my own Thompson and Samsung boxes too many times over the last few days, and I have not had any problems, but it has yet to be tested by anyone else).