Yep, eventually I figured out that I read the f/w from my DVDRW drive as I heard the drive reset after it pulled the f/w.

Anyhow, I was able to successfully pull the CORRECT f/w using a multimeter to short the pins.  I had two stumbling blocks, the first being that I didn't know the multimeter needed to be powered on to complete the ground (duh!), the second problem was that I had a SATA cable go bad and couldn't see the Samsung drive anymore till I replaced it.

Patched the Xtreme firmware with my key from the original and reflashed....worked like a charm.  Now I just need to spend some time and test a backup....

Well, I finally got it to read with this method!!!  First thing I had to do was scrape off some of the black stuff with a thin pointed tool.  Just enough so that you can see the silver from pins 19 and 20.  The black goo is so thin that it doesn't take much to scrape it away if you have the right tool.  Just went very slow and didnt use a lot of force.....

Anyhow, once I exposed the pins, I used a multimeter per Jumba, attached the black to my PC case, and shorted 19 and 20 with the red.  First attempt did nothing.  Second attempt did nothing.  However, as soon as I ran mtkflash the 3rd time (didn't even select a drive), it started reading the flash.  It counted to 100% at least 5 times it seemed.  The resulting bin file was 1,048,576 bytes in size.  Does this filesize sound correct?  I thought I saw another thread here or somewhere else that mentioned a dump of about 261k ?

I have an Nforce3 mobo and wanted to use this method to flash my ms28 drive....  My problem is that the circuit board has the hard black goo all over the SST chip.  This doesn't look like the epoxy that I have seen in some of the other pictures.

Any good way to get the goo off?