Wow! I have to say i didn't hold out much hope but i've flashed the Skybox F5 and at least i've now got lights now and can access the menus! (it came up with nochan but i'll worry about that later!)
So, for any newbies looking to fix their F5 Skybox who started reading from the last page rather than the first, my suggestion is to do the following after buying the null modem serial cable. I followed the information in the First post in this thread and it was done within ten minutes or so!
1. Register an account on techkings.org so that you can make a post to this forum (otherwise you will not be able to download the Update Tool mentioned in the First post of this thread)
2. Post an hello to this forum so that you can download the Upgrade Tool
3. Check your Skybox F5 to make sure its not a clone (in my case the remote had a little gold sticker saying QC and underneath the battery cover it said Skybox-F)
4. Open up another browser tab so that you can keep this thread open and navigate to the first page of the thread at the same time
5. Open up another browser tab and go to the skybox cc site as per the first post (note, the yojatech link seems to be a dead link now) and download the latest F5 firmware under the SKYBOX F5/F3/M3 download options (I used the one called 2013/03/28SKYBOX F5 F3 M3 - Upgrade YOUTUBE, Weather,Fix SAT List).
6. Extract the RAR to somewhere safe
7. Download the upgrade tool Upgrade_PVR800_HD_Tool.rar linked at the bottom of the first post in this thread and extract the RAR file somewhere safe
8. With the skybox power off, connect the null modem cable between the PC and Skybox and then follow the instructions in the very first post of this thread and eventually it will say 100% download complete
9. The tool will then ask if you want to write the data, to which I said yes. Note - once this reached 100% i was prompted to say whether or not I wanted to add additional data - i just clicked finish at this stage as i didn't know what additional data it was referring to (sure someone here can shed some light?)
10. On clicking finish the box came back to life and started the usual L000-L100 count (paused a little around 93-97 but carried on to 100). Then came up with NoChan. At this point there wasn't anything else I could do but power it off, disconnect the null modem and then try it out on the TV. Menus appeared and I could navigate them as usual.
All i need now is to work out how to load the channel lists etc as everything has reset back to default and its been ages since I last set one up!
Anyway, hope this helps others - it really was pretty straight forward and has taken me longer to write up than it did to carry out the process. Top marks to Kremmen, the original first poster for this.
If anyone has any comments about setting up channels or whether the nochan error is something I need to worry about then feel free to say
