Hopper, EHD, need activation to move to 2nd hopper?

I have two hoppers.

One appears to be failing (lots of hangs, pixelation, etc. on playbacks as well as live tv). I have a ton of recordings on its internal drive.

I wanted to save these off, if possible, before calling Dish as I suspect they will send out a replacement.

I have never activated an EHD on my account.

On a whim I plugged one in, formatted, and started transferring programs. I expected to be stopped and told I needed to activate, but all it says is something like "9 hours remaining".

Is it working?

Should I call and have it activated first? Does that fact it appears to be running mean I can (perhaps) transfer to and/or from but not watch without activation?

I would pay the $40 if needed, but I ONLY need the EHD to do a transfer to the new hopper (if they send one), and/or to my other hopper. Is the activation needed for that use?

Is it strange that it is working, or is that normal and I'll be stopped later?

 

Thanks.

Looks to be about half copied, so will call this evening if the receiver is still acting up. Just lots of freeze-ups. Almost like a computer that had a few hung processes and no more processing ability, or disk errors hanging. But nothing showing up anywhere. Just hope it keeps running for 4 hours.