That's almost definitely a bad hard drive. I suspect you might not even get through your current reset. In any event, a "replace" kit for your model should fix your problem:

http://www.weaknees.com/tivo-upgrade.php

I don't think it is a bad hard drive problem. I upgraded my Humax drt800 several years ago to get more capacity. I also have received this error message and spent a couple of weeks trying everything. As a last resort I reinstalled my old Humax harddrive, did the full setup and got the same error message. I doubt if both hard drives have failed simultaneously.

So did it come out of the current reset - the newer drive?

I don't understand your question.

You said:

in your original message . . .

I apologize, I didn't remember that I had posted here. Just to follow up, when this problem first started in December, the Tivo Service Level was set to "I" instead of "C" which we think was causing the error messages. When my husband did the complete "delete and clear everything," then it came back with the Tivo Service Level set to "A" and we started getting messages to activate our service, even though we have product lifetime. At this point we could no longer manual record or do anything. Tivo did not know what was wrong or how to fix it.

It turned out a lot of other customers with our box were complaining about the same problem at about the same time. Many of them posted on the tivo.com forum. http://forums.tivo.com/pe/action/for...ageId=10432560 Tivo 2nd level customer support called us back on December 30th saying that after getting complaints from other owners the same box, they had a fix for it and to power cycle and connect, and everything was fine. The other members on that forum said their systems were fixed on December 30th as well.

Now we, as well as many of the members of the same forum thread got the same symptoms around the 1st or 2nd week of February, only this time Tivo would not cooperate and starting blaming the Humax hardware crypto chip. I have been trying to get some kind of confirmation from Humax that this is the case, since it seems to behave so much like a software problem, to me and to the reps I talk to at Humax. We are kind of at an impasse at this moment with Tivo blaming Humax's crypto chip and Humax apparently never having heard of the issue. I am escalating it at Humax to see where that leads.

Every day my Tivo connects, and it is maintaining 2 weeks worth of data, and for now I am manually recording everything. The "Tivo Service Level" remains "I:-".

I'm new to Tivo, but I was under the impression that a Service Level of I indicates "Inactive". It sounds like Tivo somehow "forgot" your account information.

I could be off-base here, but I think if you can get your account corrected, you'll be all set.

As a software engineer, Tivo's answer that it is a hardware problem that affected hundreds of units at the same time (and after software changes) does not seem right.

I think "I" stands for Interrupted, and it is at least one of the possibly multiple conditions that triggers the message "Tivo Service Interrupted. The recorder has not connected to Tivo in over 30 days."

And as a software engineer as well as a software test engineer, here is my biggest gripe over this whole thing: Why Not Have the Error Message Tell the Real Reason There is a Problem???

I have seen numerous posts in the various forums over this error message, and the one common theme is it comes on suddenly, and the recorder HAS connected in the last 30 days, probably that very day. If you are an ongoing Tivo user who hadn't connected in 30 days, you would have been out of data for about 16 days and would undoubtedly have already gotten messages to that effect long before seeing this condition legitimately.

So how much time gets wasted by customers, forum participants, Tivo customer service, having people power cycle and force connections and do guided setups and just basically try everything you can think of, maybe replace your hard drive, maybe exchange your unit to fix a problem for which the error message is blatantly lying about what the problem is?

Why not save people a lot of wasted time by having a meaningful error message for what is causing this error and display THAT message when the condition is encountered.

So this is a software bug in the error handling. Their software testers should have written a bug report to that effect, and it should have been fixed in a way earlier release, as it was seen in the release 7 installation. It showed up when units failed to successfully install software upgrades.

And the message was as unhelpful then as it is now.

To quote my husband, I wish I had the hours back of my life that I have spent trying things and trying to communicate with Tivo and Humax and still getting this error and still not knowing why.