Did my Dish 721 just crap out?

[Presence]

I have a Dish 721. I have owned it for about a year but never hooked it up until a couple of weeks ago. It was working fabulously, but I had not activated it with Dish just yet.

Today I turned it on and I received "Error 104 - A serious problem has been detected with your receiver. Call blah blah number." I hear audio while this error message is showing, and can bring up the Menu and work from there, but not much else.

I have no problem calling Dish and getting this resolved. I'm not a hacker or any of that. I was just wondering if this is a serious 721 failure and I should bother. Is it because it still has a blue card? Will Dish help me even though I have not activated the receiver yet? Should I activate it first, THEN call back with the error, or will it matter?

[Mike D-CO5]

It sounds like your hard drive crapped out. When I had 3 /721s( have 2 and a 921 now) I had all three of them at one time or another do this. I did a powercord reboot and it reformated the hard drive and then I lost all my recordings ,but it started to work again. I don't know if you don't have it subscribed to Dish , what will happen but try to do a power cord reboot and see if it reformats your hard drive.

Unplug it and wait a couple of minutes and then replug it in . IF that doesn't work then subscribe it to programming and if it doesn't work add the dish home protection warrenty(5.99) and get a refurbished unit from Dish for your old one. You can alwasy unsubscribe to the warrenty when you have the new refurbished unit. You can add it just when you need it.

You really need to sub to the programming and keep it hooked up to the satellite to keep it up to date for software updates.

[Presence]

Yes, I had thought about it possibly being the hard drive. However, the receiver had no problem "validating hard drive" on initial bootup, and I could still finagle it into playing a previously recorded PVR event though I could only hear audio since the screen was taken up by the error message.

I finally called Dish tonight and it was simply a matter of adding the receiver onto my account and doing a smartcard reset (taking it out, putting it back in). No problems.

[stonecold]

That what I thought .... 104 is an unscribed cam code.

Example lets say I buy a 301 from some body which had the blue card (more on why this is important later) They unsubsribe from service completely or just call dish and told them to remove that from there account. You stick it up in the closet for 6 months to a year. pull it out and hook it up and it is getting channels. Because the card never got the unsubribe command from dish. Here is where the blue card comes in, there is a flaw in them where the programing tiers dont expire. So it holds it autherization for say Americas Every Package until dish can send down a command saying hey your not a sub box any more. ( this is not a issue for the Newer Yellow and intergrated cards as there programing tiers have a experiation date usually about 2 weeks. so this problem doesnt happen.) Now if i understand you first post you pretty much fit in my example what happen is that dish sends down random unsubsribe commands.