The Firmware Page

Hi folks!
>NIL, Hijacker. First i'd like to say great work to all of you.

Thought you might find this interesting and possibly offer some advice. I have a Sony laptop R505TE

http://www.ita.sel.sony.com/support/specs/notebooks/pcgr505te_r505tek.pdf

with a docking station containing a firewire connected UJDA710 (same as arkham79 wrote his article on).

http://www.comerford.cc/flashdvd/

The thing is that my DVDCDRW hasn't worked since November because i decided to use NERO buring ROM insted of the software the PC shipped with. (see link to Sony's one and only statement in the matter below).

http://www.ita.sel.sony.com/support/news/nero.html

In short, certain version of NERO can overwrite the firmware of the CDRW drive, effectively rendering it useless. Sony think they deserve 250$ bucks to correct the problem, i respectfully disagrees .

Is there any reason to belive that flashing the drive with your application would not get my drive back up and running?

I'm not an expert but to my understanding there is only one firmware? And if that's were the problem lies your flash should fix the problem, right?

Thanks alot and keep up the good work.

NIL -> in my case I could dump the firmware and write the new one, by using the mpatch -d and mpatch -a commands...

it's when i want to write the new firmware with DRVLOADC that it doesn't respond. I have a "dead" Dos prompt after typing the DRVLOADC command...

everything runs ok before, but it is here that I have a problem...

tazou, why don't you READ what's been posted in this thread, or the message in BIG RED letters in the first post of this thread.

Power_Mange, normally, Arzeno has started to gather firmwares for UJDA drives and will post them in the download section.
As you can use mpatch to flash these, provided you can find your original firmware (somebody has to have the same drive as yours), and provided it is indeed a firmware problem, you might be able to restore your drive.

But this is the first time I hear about a software tampering with firmware. This must be a very bad coincidence (it can happen. I ruined a Sony DVD drive by using flashing tools for Pioneer drives once on a machine that didn't have a Pioneer)...

NIL-> I'm French and I don't understand some words in posts...

Today my combo works, but the dvd mode is done... nothing was patched (I think) and when i use the autopatcher in automatic mode I have the same results as in the manual one.

Tazou,

You MUST switch off & then restart your computer after running 'mpatch' and BEFORE running 'drvloadc'.

There is a problem though: The files that are needed are created by 'mpatch' onto a virtual drive ie one that exists in RAM only. This all disappears the instant you switch off your machine, so...

BEFORE switching off your PC you must FIRST save the newly created files to a floppy disk or a hard disk that is accessable in DOS ie can be read/written to in the same condition in which 'mpatch' was run.

AFTER you save those files THEN switch off & restart your machine using the 'mpatch' floppy. DO NOT choose the automatic options in the menu - choose the manual option instead.

Copy the files you saved earlier back onto the RAM drive & then run 'drvloadc' as described a few pages ago.

OK, let's solve this problem once and for all;

Tazou,

Tu dois REDEMARRER ton ordinateur entre le moment où tu patche le firmware et le moment ou tu écris le firmware patché dans la mémoire flash.

Le problème est que le firmware patché est écrit dans un disque virtuel, c'est-à-dire dans la mémoire vive.

Tu dois donc:

1) démarrer ton PC depuis la disquette, exécuter mpatch avec les options appropriées. Tu trouveras le firmware patché dans le disque virtuel (probablement D ou E). NE PAS EXECUTER drvloadc!!!

2) insérer une disquette vierge dans ton lecteur et copier flash.bat et ton firmware patché dessus. Il faudra sans doute utiliser pkzip.

3) REDEMARRER LE PC depuis la disquette (la première)

4) NE PAS EXECUTER mpatch, mais flash.bat ou drvloadc avec les options appropriées.

5) et voilà, to lecteur est RPC1...

Salutations

.tex

tex -> thx a lot, je vais essayer tout de suite

Heya Power_mange,

I had the same problem when I had my old Sony FXA36.

The way I fixed it was by re-installing EVERYTHING on the hard drive from the bootable starter CDROMs that come with it.

I suspect, that it doesn't mess up the bios of the drive, but rather the registry entries.

When I reinstalled everything from the support / backup CDs the drive worked again no problem.

No need to pay anybody anything to fix it - of course you will lose all data / windows updates / self intalled programs, but at least your drive will work again.

Heya everyone,


I'm trying to do the firm-flash on my Toshiba 5105-501 w/ Matsushita 730 combo drive using the manual method.

I've made the floppy, extracted the new firmware and copied to 2nd floppy. Rebooted. Copied the firmware back from 2nd floppy onto ramdisk and then ran drvloadc with new firmware,

At command line:

drvloadc /M c:\TBX100M.730

but then an error message pops up saying:

File and Drive is not the same model name.

File model: UJDA 730 DVD/CDRW , drive model: UJDA 730 DVD/CDRW

That looks the same to me guys - what am I doing wrong?

Anyone else done this on this particular model / drive?

Please help - I want to watch my kung fu movies from Region 3 =)

I had the same thing but selected 'yes' to continue the flash.

All flashed OK & is now RPC2.

I mentioned it in an earlier post (might be in a different thread, thouugh).

Do you mind posting what switches you used on drvloadc?

As I posted above I only used /M (because /SM didn't work) and the file name.

Using /? on it doesn't reveal any other switches and I don't see a flash.bat anywhere.

Thanks in advance =)

/O /U /M

TYVM, Tinstaafl.

The switches did the job! =)

Finally, i can flash my drive and get a RPC1 drive!!!!

Thanks NIL for all your great job!!!!!

And for Matshita, "thanks" for making a pain in the a** drive.

Can anyone please send me the most update fw of UJDA710.
I'm using fw 1.04 and my notebook is Fujitsu S4050. The drive just couldn't read CD-ROM and burn any disk at all. Reading of DVD is fine. Does it have anything to do w/ the firmware? Please HELP!

Just another successful patch confirmation here.

I have a IBM Thinkpad T30 with a Matshita UJDA730 v1.04 DVD/CDRW drive on secondary master IDE channel.

Create a dump first using by selecting the 3rd option. I then try option 1 but hangs.

So I load up the boot disk in manual mode.

From the RAM drive with the extracted toosl:

"mpatch -a"

Copied the generated files 'changes.log', 'BMX104M.730' onto another disk. A power off and reboot with the patch disk.

"drvloadc /o /u /m bmx104m.730" (patched firmware copied back onto ram drive)

And enter 'y' to continue as the program complains about the file name and drive model be different but they both read the same.

Have tested a couple of DVD's, all working well. Also driveinfo22.exe reports no region protection.

After seeing JTIR flashing his T30, I decided to take the plunge and flash a A31p. This has the same drive and same firmware revision as JTIRs.

Did a manual patch as follows:

(1) Booted from floppy that MPatch created.
(2) Ran "MPATCH -A" and dumped the firmware to another floppy with the files CHANGES.LOG and FLASH.BAT
(3) Powered off Mobile
(4) Powered on and booted from boot floppy
(5) Copied contents from second floppy and unzipped the firmware
(6) Ran FLASH.BAT
(7) Replied "Y" when it complained about the filename and drive model being different

Tested DVD drive with RPC2 of The Matrix and RPC1 of Jaws, burned and erased and then re-burned a CD-RW with Nero v5.5.10.15.

Now very happy! Thanks!

First big ups to Nil for the program, and Tinstaafl for the plain-as-rice instructions on how to do all the file copying required to get round the freeze.

I succesfully patched and flashed my UDJA710, however I'm still having problems with the drive. Ever since I purchased my laptop I have had problems with it - at first it sometimes refused to read any type of CDs (mostly CDRs), but it was rare. Now it only works maybe 1% of the time I put a CD into it - most of the time it somehow buggers the CD itself making it unreadable in any machine!

The major problem I've got is that the laptop is currently useless as I formatted my OS partition in order to rebuild, only to find out all 3 copies of XP I had were unreadable in the drive.

Luckily I have a backup of WinXP on my desktop, but no matter how fast/slow I burn a CD copy it still doesn't install bugger all and simply tries to read the disc then fails and chews it up.

Where can I get the most recent firmware version for the drive? I tried searching on the download section of the site, but there's no download links on the UDJA710 page... anyone help me? Pls? PLS?

Oh yeah, anyone wanna help me burn the hell out of the MatSH*Ta HQ?

Sign me up!!

Hey, people, since I'm quite busy with the 105, anybody willing to help people out and make a 2 disk release for the autopatcher.
Anybody with some knowledge of DOS/Batch should be able to create a Disk 1 that would run mpatch, call pzkip, and copy FLASH.BAT, zipped files onto disk 2, and disk 2 that would unzip the files and run flash.bat.

This could help people who don't have a clue about DOS and want to use the autopatcher, the time I can get back to finding why DRVLOADC freezes out. A 2 floppy release could be nearly as dumbproof than the 1 disk I originaly planned.

Of course, people with no swappable floppies still don't have a solution.

@>NIL:

The autopatcher is working fine in the manual mode.
But it does need 2 floppies.
I have no internal floppy drive. I use USB floppy drive and it works!

Im just wondering, when will all the firmware of ujda drives appear in download section. It seems that all people already sent their firmware to the Author.

Thanks for your great job defeating region protection!!

Thanks!!


Satria

Possible the quickest, easiest way to get the use of the laptop is to get a converter (couple of quid) to plug the notebook hdd into a PC. copy the cd contents across and run xp setup from dos!

To me it would sound like your CD drive is dead. Particularly as you say once you have put disks in they will not read on any other drives. Firmware would not fix this.

Cheers! Never thought of that! DOH! I think I'm just gonna throw my fecking UJDA710 in the bin... waste of bloody space.

Any idea where to get a convertor?

er Maplin, places like that. Lol PC World if your lucky. I got one from a small shop round the corner, cost me £1!