The Firmware Page

As far as I know there was only one method to fix a drive that was flashed with wrong firmware.

- howswap trick: This basicly means that you get another same drive and boot your computer with it so it is recognised by BIOS. Then you boot into DOS and just before you start the flashing program you disconect the good drive with bad one and run flashing. It thinks that the drive connected is OK and it will overwrite it's flash. This was reported working by users on this forum.

But what if you don't have another drive? The same thing hapened to a guy called leo. He buzzed me over MSN and told me his problem.
He had a notebook with SD-C2302 firmware 1013. He wrongfully flashed his drive with 1F13 firmware and of course his drive was dead, undetected by BIOS. We then tried many diffrent things to solve his problem but none of them worked. I contacted jfm33 who helped with the 1313 firmware for 2502 and he advised to try the hotswap thing, but with only one broken drive!!!

Here is what he tried. First he downloaded RPC-1 version of 1013 firmware (if it works he will at least have RPC-1 drive ). Then unzip it in some directory on HD. Then he shut down his notebook, disconnected his broken DVD drive and booted the computer back up with boot floppy so that he would enter real DOS from where he can patch his drive.

At first he ran "resetcnt firmware.hex", just to see what it does. The response was "drive not connected". Then he hotpluged his bad drive in the laptop and started the flashing program with same command line "resetcnt firmware.hex". And what to you know! It detected his drive and asked if he wants to overwrite the firmware. He comfirmed and after the flashing he just got his broken drive back from the dead and on top of that it was RPC-1 .

Got another report from PaulK on the cdfreaks.com forum that I pointed to this thread and he successfully restored his misflashed drive. Here is what he said:

I have a similar sad experience. I have a toshiba dvd-rom sd c2402 with firmware 1709. I though to upgrade the firmware using a higher firmware version so i flashed the firmware 1Y17 using vup99l.exe. It reported the following :
00 Master IBM djsa 20
01 Slave Toshiba DVD Rom SD_C2402 1709 02/15/00
Secondary:
02 Not connected
03 Not connected
Terciary:
04 Master Not connected Etc. Etc.

Toshiba DVD Rom SD-C2402 1709 02/15/00
New F/W: 2001-07-02 19:26:00 sum=170F
RPC Scheme: Phase 2 Type: Set
Resets: MR4, UR4 Region ____2
--Drive-- ---New F/W--
F/W Rev.: 1709 ---> 1Y17
Overwrite flash Rom? (Yes/No):____


It detected the dvd-rom correctly and when it asked me to overwrite I selected yes. It wrote the flash but after don't report any succesful comparison. I waited 15 minutes and than stopped the program.
After reboot the system didn't detect the dvdrom.
I tryied to flash back the firmware 1709 without success. I tryied also the 1717rpc1 but also withput succes.
At the end i read this post but I can't try it because I can't open my notebook to disconnect the dvd drive.
Is there others trick to try to reanimate the drive ?
Thanks in advance.

Moreno

None that I know of. If you find another trick post it here.

Can't you just hot-plug the drive out of socket?

Thank you for your reply.
What do you mean with "just hot-plug the drive out of socket" ?
Perhaps can I plug out the drive like I can do with the hard disk ?
I never though that that is possible with dvd drive too. Do I need special tools to do that or I have only to pull strong the drive out ?
Please tell me the instructions to try that.

Moreno

Uf... You got me there. I do not own a laptop, but I've seen them. AFAIK you just pull strong, but that depends on the model. If I were you I would check the documentation for you laptop or ask someone with similar manufacturer.

And try it first with laptop turned off .

OK. Looks like I didn't make things clear. Do not take my words so literaly. When I wrote "resetcnt firmware.hex" I didn't mean you to write this exactly as I wrote.

Use the flashing program that comes from the ZIP file of the firmware you are trying to recover.

If the flashing utility is vup100k.exe that use it and do now seek for resetcnt.exe and try to flash with it...

Hi,..

Some laptop has internal drive, it's not hotswapable.
But other with bayswap could easily plugged out from the laptop.
Most recent laptop vendors usually equip this feature to their product.
Be careful when hotswap the drive.
I try with my Toshiba Satellite and burn my system board!!

Later,...

Hello!!!

I'm in satria_wr's position. What should I do?


thanks a lot for your advises

Hi,

I never try to flash my combo drive since there is no firmware released yet.

My question is, how to flash drive without floppy drive in the system??
Could i just make boot CD, and flash via harddisk??

Thanks,..

Yes. Boot CD also works... I had some problem if there is NFTS partition. You can use nfsdos.exe drive to read only access the ntfs partition and it works. But when I ran update.bat it gave me a stupid memory allocation error.

I then put files on floppy and flashed... Maybe it was just he notebook that I had... Well. Try it.

I cannot try the hotswap because I have no new drive.

So I tried removing, booting, then inserting the drive (Dell site has
got instructions on how to remove the drive).

The update.bat does not flash the drive if inserted with machine booted
on DOS (at least in my case, bad luck).

Now the next step is to get a new drive.

Put the firmware files on floppy.

Disconnect HD and DVD and boot from floppy.

When booted hotplug the drive and run update.bat from floppy.

I'm having a similar problem right now with the DVD/CD-RW Combo-drive of my Toshiba notebook (the drive is a SD-R2212). I flashed it with the wrong firmware version and now the drive is not detected by the BIOS anymore.

I read the above postings, and it seems that you can possibly flash the drive when it is not present during bootup, but activated later? Since my drive is not removable, I was thinking:
Maybe one could patch the flash program (not the firmware file, but the program that does the flashing, called v145teg.exe in my case) so that it doesn't probe for the drive (I know the drive is there, I also know that it must be either primary slave or secondary master. You can even specify the device number on the command line, but the program doesn't flash the drive, I guess it still tries to detect it first).
I took a closer look at the flash program and found that it has been packed by a packing tool called "diet". Found an unpacker, too, it's called "tron".
However, I'm not experienced in hacking files, especially MS-DOS executables... There don't seem to be any text strings you could search for (like "found" or "version")... I guess a patched flasher would be an ideal solution for people whose drive is not removable.

Another idea I had was this: I don't know wether the ATAPI/IDE interface in laptops is any different from desktop machines. Does anybody know if it is possible to connect a laptop cd-rom drive to a desktop computer? Are there adapters, or could one just make an adapter to fit the drive to a common IDE-cable? I have some old hardware lying around, and I would rather waste an old 486 board in an attempt to hot-plug the drive, than my expensive toshiba laptop...

If I don't find a solution to reanimate my drive's firmware, then trying to "fix" the region code stuff will be the most expensive mistake I've ever made! (should have read the articles in the forum, first...)

Usually Toshiba laptop has a swapable drive.
What's your laptop series??
If its new, it should be swapable.

Later,..

Patching a program isn't that easy...

You can connect laptop drives to PC. You need some sort of adapter. Joebar bought one and it's working perfectly for him...

My laptop is a Toshiba Satellite 2410 model (one of the newest laptops made by toshiba, I guess). The drive is a Toshiba SD-R2212 DVD/CD-RW combo drive.
According to Toshiba, you cannot exchange the drive (or the harddisk for that matter) without losing the laptops guarantee. The only thing you are allowed to exchange or add is memory. The harddisk and DVD/CD-RW are not in a bay or something, they are [*Profanity*] into the laptop.
The only official option apart from a software workaround would be to take the laptop to an approved Toshiba Service Partner and have the drive replaced there. Together with repair costs and taxes, the replacement would cost about 600 dollars. So if I can't come up with a better solution, I guess I'd rather use an external USB or FireWire CD-RW... Much cheaper...

Anyway, another thought occurred to me. I don't know how the firmware flasher checks for the drive, but if it gets the drive information from the bios, maybe it would be possible to write a TSR program for DOS, which catches the BIOS interrupt call and returns the correct device string for the secondary master, or something. I don't know if this would work, but at the moment the biggest problem seems to be to get the program to perform the flashing without probing for the proper drive first (because it won't identify itself anymore...)

I would like to share with you news about the behavior of a misflashed system. You can read in this thread my experience dated 29 August 2002. I flashed a toshiba SD 2402 drive with a wrong firmware and after the drive was not detected by BIOS. My system is an ASUS L7000G.
When I got a new 2402 drive I swapped it with the misflashed one. I thought that the problem was the drive but with my big surprise the BIOS does't detect the new drive.
I tryied to get more info about drive using vup99l.exe and I noted that the program reported the following data:
00 Master Not ATAPI device
01 Slave Not ATAPI device
Secondary:
02 Not connected
03 Not connected
Terciary:
04 Master Not connected Etc. Etc.

The correct data should be :
00 Master IBM djsa 20
01 Slave Toshiba DVD Rom SD_C2402 1709 02/15/00

The difference with the correct data is that the program report "Not ATAPI device"
It seams that the problem is not the drive but the BIOS. I guess that the program vup99l flashed part of the BIOS and not the drive firmware.
Someone is able to explain this behavior ?
The best is also to receive some hints to fix the problem but now I lost any hope to reuse a CDROM drive with my computer.

Here is what I know about Toshiba firmwares for laptops...

There are difrrent firmwares for laptop drives. The original Toshiba firmwares are the one with 10xx and 17xx in their name.

But. Usualy the drives gets sold to other manufacturers and they make their own firmware. Why? Mainly to make the drive work with their hardware settings.

What hardware setting? Well. The most inportant is Master-Slave setting. The information about it is stored INSIDE the firmware and it can't be changed with simple modification of the firmware.

So. What does this mean for flashing... You have a drive with firmware 1511. The M/S setting in this firmware is set to be as Slave. But then you flash with 1711 wich has inside the firmware the drive set to Master.

And the result? The BIOS will not detect your drive due to IDE conflict. Looks like flashing software (VUPXXXX.EXE) check the result of BIOS and since BIOS could find it it aborts any flashing.

To fool this you connect the drive after the BIOS loading and it works in some cases that it finds drive with incorrect firmware, wich eventualy can enable flashing the drive with correct firmware...

Another very good method is to connect a good drive with the same model and just before flashing you disconect it and connect a bad one. It will then flash blindy to the drive that is on that IDE.

Another option came out lately. Since there is IDE conflict, you disonnect HD and boot only with CD. Then you try to flash under DOS (to wich you can come in with Boot CD)...

If everything else fails there might another way but it needs to be found...

But. Some drives get FUBAR... Can't do much about them then only replace them...

Thanks Hijacker for the fast reply (are you allways online and poll the forum every time ? )
About your ideas I can tell that the one concerning HD disonnection and boot only with CD doesn't function. When I boot without HD nothing happens because BIOS doesn't detect the cdrom drive.
Note that the cdrom drive I used is exactly the same model as the misflashed one. Could be that the one sold has different firmware.
Interesting the info about master salve setting and firmware version. Do you know a tool or technic to discover the master slave setting in the Toshiba drive ?
Moreno

Of course! If the new CDROM has diffrent firmware it might not work due to allready written reasons (MS).

To see where the drive is download a nice little app called IdeDiag.

Run it under DOS.

hello everybody
i read intrested the pages about all the problems with SD-R2212 (Toshiba)
I also missflashed my combodrive SD-R2212 (Toshiba) and now my Toshiba laptop can't detect it.
The ROMVersion is 1314. Has anybody any information about this version (IDE Port, Master, Slave)?
I heard that these information are burned on the ROM.

Thanks for helping me.

Just try both of the methods.

After to have tryied many possible solutions without any succes I decided to go to the customer service office of my computer. I explained what i have made and they substituted the misflashed drive with a new one. Allt the work has been made in guarantee. Simply great !!
Now my laptop is OK and I think that in the future I will never try other firmware upgrade.
Thanks to all contributed to this thead.
Moreno

To you the decision of a problem with firmware Toshiba 2502!
As is known the mode master - slave is set firmware
In notebook usually it is impossible to choose in BIOS how to put the device
(master or slave) therefore if old firmware was the master and new slave in bios not device to be defined{determined} and flash to fail. What to do{make}?
We take out DVD from notebook and we find 47 contact on his{its} socket
We solder to it{him} a wire with the resistor 300 ohm
We close it{him} on the case and we receive a mode master
We close it{him} on +5 volt and we receive a mode slave
Thus it is possible flash anyone firmware in DVD
As it is possible to restore DVD after unsuccessful flash


Excuse for bad English


alex from RUSSIA