This blog consists of my personal views and opinions about this universe and whatever other universes coexist with ours. I build and repair computers for a living plus I’m a Power Seller on Ebay. I also run another site called The Albion Oracle (http://www.albionoracle.wordpress.com) which consists of news in my little town, if you have a question about computers or anything else email me at scottr.heath@yahoo.com.
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There is a fix for this. Get the Comcast people to remotely send a “hard reset” or a “factory default” code. The techs mights not know what that means exactly, so let me tell you what I did.
What I did was call them and tell them my cable box wasn’t working and I wanted them to reset it. (I didn’t mention it was really just the serial port that wasn’t working). They sent a “reset”, but apparently it was only a soft-reset because I didn’t see the box completely shutdown and reboot. They asked me if it was working now and I said “no”. So then they sent the hard reset I was after. After the box gets a hard reset, it resets itself several times (presumably after it is redownloading firmware). Once it’s done resetting the serial port should work again.
It was explained to me from another source that this works because Comcast initially released a patch that disabled the serial ports on the cable boxes but perhaps because of users like you protesting, they disabled the patch. However, if your box had already received it, your port isn’t re-enabled unless you can reset it back to factory defaults, at which point, it doesn’t re-download the patch that caused the problem in the first place. It worked for me.