I am sure this has been discussed several times in the past. I apologize in advance if this question is in violation of any rules: I am semi familiar with using fire wire to pull content off the dvr, but has anyone had any success with actually removing the hard drive from an SA 8300HD and installing that drive in a pc/mac, then pulling the recorded content off of it?

No. The recordings are encrypted, so there's no chance of pulling recorded content off the hard drive.

The HDTV Tivos are the only boxes that allow you to download recorded files directly. Screenshot (http://mysite.verizon.net/~fiosdvr/tivoweb.png).