Binflash - NEC/Optiarc firmware flasher and dumper

Thanks a lot, Liggy and Herrie. I just dumped my "prodisc S03 fix" firmware with the windowsflasher. No problems at all - even the scan option worked perfectly. Keep up the good work!

One question though: IMO, the s03 fix firmware (based on 1.07 beta 5) is excellent. Only the support for Ritek D01 dual layer media is missing. AFAIK, it is possible to add support for these media by using the strategy for Mitsubishi dual layer media. Would it be possible for you to add this to the s03fix firmware?

Is the ProdiscS03 fix you are referring to the "standard" Herrie 107v2b5 firmware? I'm curious because I'm receiving some ProdiscS03 discs in a couple of days.

Cheers,
Peter

Check out Herrie's post

brilliant just flashed my 2510 first time with herries V1.07 just going to read up on the advantages over the 2.16 original firmware.

And that's because 2.17 is a synthesized version and is not based on any official NEC 2.17 release. It is our policy to leave firmware versions and vendor specific information alone. We'll wait for official 2.07 and 2.17 versions to become available. The TDK 2.77 will work as is on ND-3500AG drives.

Brother Vlad

Thanks Brother Vlad for your comment. Now we have to wait for NEC to release these official new firmwares.

AFAIK, it is different from the standard beta5. Herrie sent it to me because I had some issues with S03s before. But this firmware solved my problems. Contact me at easy-going-man@lycos.de and I send you the binary .

Very good work the scan option did work for me (after i realyse it was not the -s option :S).
That's a good thing cause last time, i had to remove my drive from my PC and connect it in another PC so i could upgrade it !!!!!
I think i was becaue of my raid beeing pri/sec and my HDs on #3 and my NEC end up on channel #4 and for DOS boot did not find it
So GOOD work!! going to be way ezer to upgrade next time around, especially if someone make a GUI

Hmm, this might be a good time to mention the Windows XP Power toy "Open Command Window here".
Useful and fun utilities: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/d...powertoys.mspx

I've updated the flasher to version 0.92. Since several parts of the code were rewritten, some new errors may have been introduced, but the flashing and dumping code in general did not change.

Beginning with this new version, the flasher has its own website. You will find the flasher and some information on the new Uniflash homepage. No need to complain about the website design(design? Where is a design on this page?). I never said that I'm a good webdesigner
I'll add more information to this page whenever I find some time to do so. The flasher should also be available on Herrie's NEC Portal soon.

The Mac version has not been updated yet as I need to get access to a friend's iMac to compile the program. Building a cross compiler on my PC unfortunately did not succeed.

In exchange there's now a 32 Bit DOS version available that has not been tested as well until now.

Great work as always Liggy! Thanks!!

Liggy,

On the Uniflash homepage the download files have no extension. I downloaded the Windows version and had te rename the "1" file to 1.zip myself. After that I could unzip the new flash tool.

Liggy, thanks for this update. Now I don´t get any error messages when loading...

ScorpioSoft, no problem here...using Mozilla Firefox and WinRAR installed.

Hmmm, strange! This is the link I get when trying to download the windows version; http://uniflash.cdfreaks.com/download/1/1

The link is correct, but the script should send appropriate headers that usually makes browsers change the resulting filename.
Have to look at this tomorrow. Not going to spend much more time at my PC today. Maybe I should change some things in the download script...

Hello everyone,

I have had no luck with using this new NEC firmware flasher. I have the standard setup with my NEC2510 as the master drive on the secondary IDE and I have successfully flashed it to Herrie's B5 with the danger bros dos flash utility (nec2x00a). I scanned and it found my drive no problem. I then tried flashing to the stock 2.16 for some testing and it gave me no errors and DVDInfoPro reported the firmware as being 2.16. But when I tried inserting any blank media, the drive would not be able to see it (saying no media present) and I also tried a commercial movie DVD-ROM and it couldn't even see that! I tried flashing in windows with the new flasher back to Herrie's B5 and with the same results. Luckily I was able to flash back to Herrie's in true dos with the danger bros flasher to recover my drive.

Has anyone else had these results? I love the idea of being to quickly change between firmwares, but it just didn't work for me.

Cheers,
Tom

Did you reboot your PC after flashing? If you didn't, that may be the reason for your problems. There's a hint about this in the first post of this thread.

Hi Liggi,
I like your flashertool, but I have problems with the linux-version because of missing libaries. This is always a problem with differend distribution. So I think it would make sence to build a static linked version to avoid this problem.
I was also confused that the "DOS" Version don't run in "Real"-DOS and only in the command-window. A pure MS-DOS-Version would be nice so everyone an use Freedos to build a bootdisk to flash the ROM.

Can you release the Source of this tool? This would make it easier!

Some last remark: I made a cat nec*|strings|more and it looks like there are some undocumented parameters (or at least the strings)? Isn't it? What are they for?

Thx,
cosinus

how does the dumper work? Do you put the same path after -dump as you would -flash? The reason I ask is that I cant get back to FW vers. that allows me to burn Go4 at 8x as I was with a pervios version of herries FW at the moment it seems I have 2.06. HELP please

I'm not that familiar with creating Linux programs, but I try to find out how to create a statically linked version. (Does anyone have the commandline switch(es) for me that g++ needs?)
I can't provide a real 16 Bit DOS program, since I need to load the complete firmware file into memory before flashing. I didn't test any other than the windows version before, so I can't comment on what other versions do. I should be able to test the DOS32 version, but I had to install Linux on my PC to test this version as well. (Virtual PC doesn't allow real low level access to my drives)

I could, but I won't. I won't release sourcecode of tools that could damage the drives if you don't know exactly what you are doing.

There is indeed a switch "-d" (I think I already mentioned it in the sticky post), that's used for debugging. But this switch is available in the debug builds only and those are not released to public since the resulting files from the debug build are not compatible with common firmware binfiles.

You use dump, if you want to save the firmware that your drive currently uses to disc and flash, if you want to flash a new drive to the firmware.
If you flash a firmware that you previously dumped to your harddisc, your drive should have the same state as before.

-static should do the job. This will blow up the size of your programm but should then run without any libs on nearly any linux.
Ahhhh I remember there was a 640K limit and stuff like this. I googled around a little bit and found:
http://www.freedos.org/freedos/softw...openwatcom.lsm
I don't know your program but it should not be a problem to port this to the openwatcom compiler and there is a DOS-Expender that could maybe load the hole FW-file. Isn't it? Free-Dos fits on a sigle Floppy so I should not be a Problem to Boot it. There is also a CD-Image so maybe you can boot from CD-Drive A and Test flashing with CDROM B?

I understand your point but I personaly trust open source projects more. But I think it's very easy to damage the drives without knowing the source (turn off while flushing etc.). So there is no extra risk.

Ahhh I understand.

Thanks again for this program,
cosinus

I'll try this when I'm back home from work. I don't think the program will get too big. I don't use that many libraries I think. (Don't know about the SCSI library)

I thought the DOS32 version works from pure DOS, but most people will probably prefer other versions anyways. Maybe I just need to do a little bit more, have to check it out. Please consider that big parts (the SCSI library) were not written by me, so I don't know if there are some further restrictions.

Maybe some people experiment with the sourcecode and try to do some changes that lead to an unusable drive. BTW: I don't force you to trust me, everyone may use my flasher at their own risk.

Good point. There are so many other ways to damage a drive. However TDB have already released a DOS flasher so I don't see the point in Liggy releasing a real DOS flasher as well. Actually I think the Windows flasher is the tool we have been missing. No booting to DOS, works even if you don't have a floppy, doesn't cause problems on NTFS-only systems either. If only it wasn't necessary to reboot after flashing (unless you have the drive mounted in an USB case ).