Saw a broken SV8000HD on craigslist, I'll see if its still up for grabs. Seller says it wont power on but does see a green light inside.. hehe, easy fix if I can grab it. Asking $75.00 for it, too much if not powering on. I will offer considerably less then that.. stay tuned.
A few weeks back I tried putting the factory firmware that is on the sonicview website on my HD8000 and it kept popping up error messages like you are saying "Must Upgrade Software" or something similar.. I ended up eventually finding a random hacked firmware on it from a year or two ago and the box works fine although there are some pirate functions in there that don't serve any purpose.. I ended up going this route after trying lots of different versions that claimed to be clean.. I suspect that SonicView didn't write any legit firmware version in years..