Having this information when the Comcast tech (and TG it was a real Comcast guy and not an independent) made the re-pairing much easier and quicker. I handled the remote and the tech handled the telephone and the Comcast cc folks. The Comcast office cc folks did not really understand why the data numbers would change, but all is well now. Thanks!!

For the benefit of others, can you tell us what you had to do to talk to the right person? And once you talked to the right person, I assume you just had to give the tech the new data id?

I tried to keep it simple. I told the Comcast tech that my cable cards had been working correctly, but that the premium and digital channels disappeared about a week ago. I did not know why, but some other folks on various Tivo AV forums had had the data id change after their original installation and I was sure that this had happened to my cablecards.

I showed him that I was receiving the premiums on my other cable box and this helped to get the Comcast office to even look at the existing data id numbers - which were different. Yes, I just gave the tech the new numbers. He gave them to the office and they re-entered them and voila - all was fine.

To be honest, I had a very cooperative tech, who could tell that I knew what I was talking about. In fact, when he was leaving, he indicated that Tivo must have changed the data id's because the home office of Comcast would not change them.

He did tell me to write down my data id numbers and that if this happened again to call customer support and have them put me through to the cc folks and tell them that my data id's had changed and have them re-enter them. I would suggest that anybody who has this issue should call their provider and be affirmative and specifically state that they were sure that the data id's had changed - this might avoid a service call.

When will your 500GB upgrade drives be the DB35s (or will they be offered in the DB35 configuration)?

We still don't have an ETA on the 500 GB SATA DB35 drives. We sell many more of the 750s, so we made those our highest priority with Seagate, and they came first.

I just wanted to say that I received a bare Seagate DB35 in the mail from WeaKnees today, and that the install in my Tivo S3 went very smoothly. I used the bumwine method with a Knoppix boot CD. Everything took about 2 hours (including 90 minutes for the dd). Pay channels (HBO, Starz, etc...) are all coming in fine after the upgrade. Disk copy is the way to go! I now have my original 250 GB drive standing by as a backup if the 750 GB drive ever dies *knocks on wood*.

I had to buy a PCI-SATA card to do the copy because my computer's mobo doesn't support SATA, but that was a nice upgrade to my computer anyways, so I consider that money well spent.