So I installed the new Sandisk drive and spent a little time porting the temp drive content over to the new system. I can confirm a couple of things.
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if the RPi isn't connected to a wired network cable, the output to the HDMI does not seem to happen. It's possible that the initial boot is halted somehow if it can't connect to the network. I think that was probably my problem before. I generally get the device to boot up, make sure it's secure, and then connect it to my network. With the network cable plugged in, I do see HDMI out and can see the login prompt after boot.
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There's something quirky with the setup outlined here:
https://getchannels.com/docs/articles/how-to/migrate-dvr-to-new-computer/#set-up-your-new-channels-dvr-server
If I burn the new bootable USB for the Channels DVR, but I don't do any setup, I go straight to the "restore" option, it tells me that I can't restore from the additional attached storage drive (just a regular fat32 usb stick with the DVR directory on it) without shutting down the DVR. However, to shutdown the DVR, you have to actually setup the DVR. So I have to go through the setup process, have it download all the TVE programming, and then I can shut the DVR down and restore from the attached backup. I don't have an HDR device, so maybe it's not quirky if you have one?
The good news is that I've got the new system up and running on the RPi, so YAY to that!
One final question, what's the advantage of using the Channels DVR image over using a standard RPi image and just doing the "linux install" process and storing everything on an externally connected USB 3.0 drive?
Thanks again for everyone's help!