The Firmware Page

I've started this new thread about this firmware because I had a few questions I didn't see addressed in other threads - hope that's okay.

First, I have successfully made my drive region-free on previous computers; and I've been reading as much as I can find on these forums to try and answer my questions, but am still unclear on a couple of things - so thank you in advance for your help!

I have a GS23N drive with firmware SB03. My understanding about flashing this drive is that there are two options:

1. I can use MCSE to patch the firmware to RPC2 auto-reset, then execute the new firmware in a windows environment.

If this is successful, then as I understand it I will have to set my drive region every time I insert a DVD (if the region is different from the last-used region) - but then every time I restart my computer, it'll reset the number of changes allowed to the number I had left when I flashed the drive.

Couple of questions about this process. First one is, can I do this using Wine? I can successfully open MCSE through Wine, and I have opened the firmware which I downloaded, and I can check the RPC2 Auto Reset button, but I haven't saved it yet. Assuming I did save it, I would then open it through Wine and go from there?

I did notice one odd thing in MCSE - which is that the firmware rev listed is GS20N rather than GS23N - do you know if that's correct for a GS23N drive?

2. I could use Devilclaw's flasher via terminal in a Mac environment.

I'm unclear about how to do this though. I downloaded Flasher and put it in my applications folder, and I found this thread viewtopic.php?f=2&t=46137&p=225464&hilit=devilsclaw+flasher#p225464 - which seems to have instructions - but I am really not sure of the order that I should put those commands into terminal. Could you advise? I think that I'm meant to rip the firmware out of an updated windows version (not sure where to find that); dump the firmware I have already; and replace it. But I am unclear about that, and I don't really know much about the use of terminal.

Thanks again for your help!

To answer point 1 of your post, you can patch the firmware with MCSE running under Wine, that should work.
LG sells the same hardware under different names, having different features, using almost the same firmware, just differing in a few drives. MCSE displays the main name of the firmware, but can not display all the subnames avaliable.
IIRC I have read that a LG flasher worked under Wine running on Linux. LG has released about 15-20 different flashers, so that may not count for all LG and Linux releases. The patch made with MCSE does not influence the compatibility of the flasher at all. I do not know if any LG flasher runs under Wine on any MacOS version.

Hi

Thanks for your response. I'm not sure what you mean about the LG flasher working under Wine/Linux - that's beyond my scope of knowledge!

Without understanding the second part, I'm still understanding that I can use MCSE to flash my drive through Wine following the steps I listed above, is that right?

Thanks for your patience - I like to be really sure I'm doing the right thing considering that I'm risking my drive functionality to do it!

MCSE is no flasher. It just patches the firmware embedded in the original LG flasher package.
I can not tell you if the LG flasher package will run under Wine on MacOS. I can only tell you that a patch applied with MCSE does not change the original behavior.

So I patch the firmware to RPC2 auto-reset using MCSE and Wine, and then open the patched firmware .exe file through Wine - and do I still need to flash after that? I didn't think I did, I thought that was enough to make it so that I could restart the computer to reset the number of changes available - but am I wrong in that?

The LG .exe file IS the flasher. I can not recommend to use it under Wine on MacOS as I do not know if it works under Wine on MacOS.
The MCSE RPC2 AutoReset patch does not change the behaviour of the original LG flasher.

Ok thanks, that's helpful.

Hopefully someone else reading this may have experience with the LG .exe and Wine.

I didn't think that the flasher would run under wine and work in linux, maybe there is a trick or something to do it. I tried before and it was not able to find the drive to flash to and when I added the /dev/cdrom for example to the config it did not work either.

as for the MCSE if it patches the firmware then you can use my tool to rip the firmware out of the LG .exe and then flash it. I plan on making it possible to flash from the exe soon since extracting it and then flashing it can be a pain.

Hey

Thanks for that, good to know it won't work with wine - and thanks for your work on creating flasher.

I am having some issues using flasher - I will post those in the thread about using your flasher.

Cheers