The Firmware Page

Could anybody explain to me why DVRflash is not able to read Pioneer firmware, I thought that if it is able to write then it surely must be able to read. When it writes the firmware does it verify? that surely must involve reading. The reason I am asking is after looking through many posts and from my own experience it would be really handy to be able to recover the firmware from a Pioneer drive. After my original DVR died, I bought a Pioneer DVR-K17RS very cheap on Ebay because my laptop is old and I didn't want to be buying a new drive. However I have now found that no firmware releases for this drive seem to exist on the entire planet and the drive is RPC2. Is it possible to get a copy of DVRflash source code or does Agent Smith not allow that?

I think you mix up several things wrong.
DVRFlash wouldnt be able to write firmwares if it couldt read them...
But there is a big difference between reading and dumping!
Of course it does verify when flashing firmwares.

"Recover firmware from a dead drive" - how should that work in practice?

Because you drive is a slimtype drive, you need to read everything about OEM FIRMWARES first.

Hi - I think as you put it "you mix up several thing wrong" I do not want to recover the firmware from my dead drive, I want to recover from my new drive.
Please explain the 'difference between reading and dumping' because to my knowledge all you need add is a small subroutine to open a file and write the read data to it. I have experience of many flashing programs and the majority have backup options. It's irresponsible programming to allow flashing without first backing up.
Where do I find all this information 'about OEM Firmwares' that you mention? I have looked at the DVRflash page and it refers back to this forum but I cannot find any DVRflash information on here.

The problem here is that the commands that you need to send to a drive for flashing are known by tracing what the original firmware flashing tools do. However as these tools do not dump a drive's firmware, you cannot just add the same for dumping. Flashing or Dumping firmware is not just as simple as opening a file for reading or writing.

Pioneer drives for example need a certain type of "WriteBuffer" commands to send a kernel and firmware to the drive. While there also is a "ReadBuffer" command, it does not give you the data back if you feed it with the same parameters. Some drives may have known commands for dumping firmwares (Optiarc DVD burners), while the commands for other drives are either unknown or maybe in some cases they just don't exist.

For verification of firmwares, most drives require checksums in their firmwares and of course the drives can verify if the firmware matches the given firmware even if they don't allow sending the firmware back to the PC.

Thanks Liggy for your extensive answer.

OEM firmwares for slimtypes: you cannot just (cross)flash your drive with another OEM firmware and then expect it to work...

Thanks Liggy for taking trouble to actually read my post and give me some sort of answer. As for chef, again you jump to the wrong conclusions, nobody's talking about cross-flashing. I just wanted to know why DVRflash cannot dump firmware and Liggy has explained. Knowing something about microelectronics I find it hard to believe there is no way to interrogate a drive's firmware (I'm sure Pioneer must have something) and if I could access my new drive's firmware I would have a go at patching it myself as there are many tutorials on the web and it would have been a nice little side project for me.

Eh, read about what I posted, carefully.

Flashing a slimtype with another OEM firmware is kinda crossflashing, if you believe it or not. The outcome is the same.

Nobody said that it's not possible. In almost any case you can read the drive's firmware by unsoldering the flash chip and reading it with external hardware. Perhaps there is a way to dump Pioneer firmwares and nobody found it. Good luck in finding such a command yourself but this is often something like finding the needle in a haystack

I once did a Pioneer firmware patch myself, adding a command to read the drive's memory. This way I could dump the drive's kernel although only a main firmware was available. But this patch took quite a while and could only work because a main firmware was available.