My neighbor has a Tivo Series 2 with a lifetime subscription. A little while ago it developed what I assume to be a drive problem as it won’t go past the Tivo "Powering up…" screen. Am I correct that the lifetime sub is tied to hard coded number in the box and not anything loaded on the hard drive?

If so, I am wondering if I would be able to pull an image of my spare, decommissioned Series 2 with WinMFS load it on to a different HDD, slap it back into my neighbor’s Series 2 and have his lifetime sub still in place?

I think this will work but I wanted to run it by the guru’s here first.