About necflash on Mac and NEC ND-3550A

Xanrov

I have this drive , enclosed in an old (2006) Lacie external burner with USB2 and FW 400 connections. I can connect it either to a PC with Windows 7 (and FW) or to my Mac Pro.
I want to flash it to RPC1 and I'd prefer work on the Mac, because I'm familiar with it and the Terminal and I don't have Dos anymore.

My first steps were to use necflash on the Mac, the drive being connected by FireWire.
necflash -scan recognised and named it beautifully (as well as 2 other internal drives)
nec flash - dump worked like a charm and gave me an "oldfirmware.bin" weihging 1 966 088 bytes, a size which has some chance to be correct.
From Liggy's and Dee's NEC and OptiArc Firmware I downloaded what I guessed to be necessary :

LD3550 1.Y6 RPC1 Firmware Package.exe

Now I'm puzzled : I expected a termination in *.bin. Looks that it cannot be used on mac and I'll have to go Windows . Of course I have nothing against
Windows, it's just I'm less at ease there.
In short : may I use this executable directly in the Mac Terminal ? and is the file above the good one ?

Albert

Welcome.

That's likely the right package, and it's likely packaged to be self-extracting or self-flashing only in Windows. Of course, if it's merely self-extracting, you can take the firmware and flash via OS X, but you might as well do all the work in Windows.

Liggy

Just feed the executable to your Binflash Mac version. This will work perfectly fine.

Binflash will automatically find the required firmware inside the executable and flash the drive. In Windows you would just have to run the executable as it contains the flasher application and the firmware (no self-extractor required)

In case you're facing issues, this could be caused by using an external enclosure. I already heard of people who could successfully dump the firmware from an external enclosure but not flash a new version.

__________________
You need to flash or dump your NEC DVD burner firmwares on your Mac, Windows, DOS or Linux machine? Just try Binflash.
Visit Liggy's and Dee's Optiarc and NEC firmware and tools page for all kind of information about NEC and Optiarc drives.

Unrequested PM about drive problems will not be answered!

Xanrov

Complete success !
My old drive is from now on RPC-1 (region free) as stated by DVD Info X
My warmest thanks to Albert and Liggie . Their help was all the more valuable that it was so quick

Just one comment : I admire the robustnesss of this necflash program. In effect I did a first flash with the wrong file ( and saw that the drive was still RPC-2 but with the new firmware). I repeated the flash with the good one and ... Wow !
Thanks again

Liggy

It's mostly the drive that has some integrated checks to make sure that no invalid firmware can be flashed.

Necflash doesn't do much more than searching for a valid firmware in a given file from the end to the beginning and if one is found that matches the current drive, it's transferred to the drive.

__________________
You need to flash or dump your NEC DVD burner firmwares on your Mac, Windows, DOS or Linux machine? Just try Binflash.
Visit Liggy's and Dee's Optiarc and NEC firmware and tools page for all kind of information about NEC and Optiarc drives.

Unrequested PM about drive problems will not be answered!