The transfer went way faster than the last time I tried this. I think taking the drives out of the USB enclosures and mounting them in the Mac Pro's internal SATA bus might have something to do with that, well, and the Ubuntu vs. KNOPPIX factor, too.
In a nutshell, there are three partitions on the ViP 211 EHD. The first is 2 GB Linux ext3 named some long string of hexadecimal characters, the second is a smaller Linux Swap partition, and the rest of the drive's capacity is ext3 formatted named "EHD". This is different from the 622/722 (and I'm assuming the Hoppers) where the capacity of the drive is broken into 512 GB ext3 partitions. This makes moving content a lot easier since you don't need to switch partitions,
I mounted the first partitions of the old drive and the new drive and copied the catalog files and the pvr log files. I did not bother with the nightly log files or crash logs. I used the default Terminal program and the "sudo cp --preserve=all {source} {destination}" command to perform the copy as root. With the actual programming, there are three files associated with each event, named something like "esnnnn" (where nnnn is a zero-filled number). This took the bulk of the time. The esnnnn.bm file contains the Information about the event and is fairly small (under 10 KB) while the esnnnn.ts file is most likely the video stream (multi-GB size). I'm not sure what the last file could be as it is a variable number of MB in size.
So that was pretty simple. I connected the new drive to the ViP 211k, let it be recognized, rebooted, and after the usual satellite acquisition (the program guide was recognized from before and didn't need to be updated) I had all of my previously recorded program events! Yay!
So now I have almost 148 hours of HD capacity for my ViP 211k (almost 600 hours of SD room). I doubt Dish will ever expand the capacity of the 211/211k/411 past the current 2 TB upper limit, so I won't ever need to do this again.
I need to do something about the SiiG enclosure's LED, though. It is very bright blue and I can see it blinking behind the TV stand with the lights on. I can only imagine it with the lights turned off.