I purchased my RCA DCR8030N new Walmart about 5 months ago. It was on clearance for $130. Haven't had a single problem with it till yesterday, when out of the blue, the darn thing took a brain dump on me and decided not to respond to any input from the remote or the front panel controls. It just sits there mindlessly scrolling HELLO over and over and over again :eek:. I have tried everything I can think of short of slamming it against the wall... anybody have any suggestions as to a fix?

Thanks,
Dave

My Pio 640 did that yesterday (first time for any of my Pios) and I just unplugged it for 10 minutes or so. Plugged back in and it's working fine.

Spoke to RCA customer service this morning and they suggested trying a reboot by unplugging for 13 minutes, tried it and it's still locked up. The lady told me they would replace if I would send them the defective unit at my expense :mad:, said the warranty covered replacement but not shipping. Due to the fact these have been discontinued I asked her to check if they had any in the warehouse before I paid to have mine shipped to them and she told me she could not do that as it was a different section :confused:. Supervisors were of course unavailable. I am awaiting an email with complete instructions for returning the darn thing to RCA.

Dave

It might be worthwhile to leave it unplugged for a much longer time...as long as you can spare...you need to satisgy yourself that you've wiped out any memory it's still retaining. Is there anything in the manual that states how much "battery backup" time it has? Also, see if there's a special set of keys that you can press to do a "factory reset"...might work to hold those keys down when starting up again?

wabjxo,

Yep, had left it unplugged overnight and still it defies me. Unfortunately nothing in the manual about any key combos for a factory reset or battery backup times.

Dave

One more thing...disconnect any inputs you might have coming into the RCA...cable, cable box, sat receiver, etc.

In fact, you might try this first and see if that alone "releases" it.

If not, try the 13-min. unplug with no inputs to the RCA.

wabjxo,

When it went down on me I disconnected all inputs and uplugged overnight, the 13 minute unplug thing was tried with inputs and without still nogo. Only thing keeping me from smashing this thing against the wall, other than it would mess up my wall...ha ha, is I need to return it to RCA for replacement.

Dave

Received my email from RCA, it states that once the product is returned to Thompson, it will not be returned to me. It goes on to say that upon recept of the product a replacement will be shipped to me based on inventory availability. I contacted the 800 number on the email to check on availability and was was given a 30 minute runaround by a nasty customer service rep, who would not allow me to speak to a supervisor BTW, she said I would have to send the unit in before they could check to see if it was in stock. After a few more minutes of heated discussion she told me she would have the warehouse call me. Just got off the phone with the warehouse guy. He said that the item had not been discontinued but was not in stock at this time and they had no idea when it would be. He offered to exchange my recorder for a RCA DRC8335 wich is a combo DVD/VHS recorder without the hardrive. I told him that was totaly unacceptible and inquired as to having my unit repaired his answer was that they will not repair it only exchange it and asked why was I being so unreasonable, with that I abrubtly hung up on him. What a load of smelly horse dung!! According to manual they will pay for parts and labor to repair, but it seems that is not the case here. I guess I'll salvage the harddrive from this POS and file 13 the rest.

Dave

I had the same thing happen to me late last week, the difference being my machine is a 3 month old LG DR787T. I unplugged it to reset it and that worked at first, then even that didn't work after 2 times. Unplugged it overnight and that didn't help, either, so off it went to Best Buy (where we bought it) and they sent it out for repair Monday (covered under their Protection Plan, and it's also still under warranty, so should not cost to get it fixed).

I kind of wish BBuy would offer to replace it...or give me the equivalent of what we paid for it to get something else. We shall see...in 2-3 weeks.

Sorry you had bad luck with yours as well, Dave. IMO the RCA people are the ones being unreasonable...why should you send back your machine not knowing if they can even replace it (even if there's no other cost other than shipping)? They just don't get it, apparently.

DK

I have this unit i love it. On the warranty on these units in my manual it says if you need repair service while under warranty that you could take it to your local authorized RCA Dealer for service,

I tried this unit for a few days and loved the pause/FF/rewind Live TV abilities as well as the ease of transfer to DVD! The editing software was horrible though!

FYI, In December 2006, Thomson SA (of France) agreed to sell its consumer electronics accessory business, including rights to use the RCA name for consumer electronic accessories, to Audiovox of the U.S.A. This change of ownership might explain some of the problems with customer support. I still thought it was more than a decent unit for $198.

Absolutely loved mine for the 5 whole freakin months it worked, lets see I payed $140.40 with tax that works out to $28.08 per month rental.

Yep, according to the owners manual this thing has a 1 year warranty that covers parts and labor to repair (that you must pay for out of pocket first and then submit the repair bill to be reimbursed BTW) I was willing to try and do that, but when I called RCA (so called) customer service again to find out where my nearest authorized service center was so I could try to get this thing fixed the rep said they did not have that info and informed me in no uncertain terms that RCA would not pay for any repairs on this unit. Again a supervisor was conveniantly not available. This latest round with these idiots and thier refusing to honor the terms of the warranty to reimburse me for repairs to it IMHO is just PLAIN HORSE CRAP!! Basicaly the warranty is not worth the paper it is written on.
Dave

sparksnsuch,
Maybe we don't have the same manual cause in my owner manual it says that all you need is proof of ownership or your receipt within the warranty period to pick it up after repairs are made at your local RCA authorized dealer.it didn't say anything about paying any money and then getting reinbursed.

Mine is also locked up, saying "Hello" over and over after plugging in the power.
Tried swapping in a new HDD drive and get the same behaviour.
Has anybody found a solution, or a way to reset or reboot this thing?

Also, there's a four pin header/connector accessible through a hole on the bottom of the unit (the hole is covered by a piece of tape). Any idea whether it's for rebooting or resetting the unit?

Thanks,

Confirmed that the problem is actually a dead DVD drive.
I took one out of my pc and plugged in the IDE cable and power and it works great, but doesn't fit into the DVR chassis.

The dvd drive is a "Smart pro BDR-L08" and does not have the typical rectangular configuration of drives for pc's - it has molded in mounting feet. There seems to be no information on the web about this component.

Any idea if this is a typical configuration for dvd drives mounted in consumer electronics (rather than pc's)? Or a source for replacement?
(My 8030 is out of warranty, so it's either pay for a new drive or junk it.)

Thanks,
Steve

I, too, have a DRC8030N that just stopped working. I was a bit pissed that it was just a few months out of warranty, but it looks like the warranty might be pretty worthless by what I read here.

I was fooling around with the library of titles recorded on the HDD and the picture just went blank with a cryptic message like 'inadequate signal' or something similar. I tried the unit on another video input and even another TV with the same results, so it must be the DVR. Here is the funny thing - when I remember the menu commands (since I can't follow on the screen) I can set my TV input to the DVR and have it watch live TV and I get the audio, but no video. It seems like there should be some way to reset this, but as ya'll have pointed out, nothing seems to work.

I also had an RCA DRC8005N (no HDD) and it lasted about a year as well. I like the way these work with a couple of RCA TVs that I have, but they just don't seem to hold up very well.

Please let me know if anyone has any further ideas.

thanks