TS-H943 firmware dump by software

[Geremia]

mm, i could be wrong, but in mtkflash there is no reference to intel southbridge ICH7, only ICH5 and ICH6, maybe it will only works till i915 chipset

[Geremia]

Just tried today with an i865 chipset with ICH5 southbridge, the TS drive was recognized and flashed in both sata native mode and remapped mode, without any special setting or hotswapping.

[Arakon]

I'm using a MSI k7n2 delta now which has a promise SATA controller, and apparently runs completely seperately from the MB bios.. still no detection, no matter what I try. tried swapping with a HDD, with a dvdrom, no go.. and I still never get the question to select a drive, even with two other drives attached.. just "no drive found". did I miss any flags, or a version number of mtkflash or what? I use the one found on the mtkflash main website.

[Geremia]

text area inside mtkflash let suppose that the only chipset supported for sata are:

ICH5
ICH6P
ICH6
ICH6M
VIA8237
Si3114
SiS964
SiS180
SiS965
NV nForce3

[Arakon]

meh.. that sucks.guess I either have to hope it will support more (not likely considering nforce 3 is already in it, but the other, older chipsets are not), or look for a PCI card.

[jumba]

Hi all
I suspect that the difficulty in downloading f/w is due to a block emmbedded within the mtk chip is activated as the rom initializes. Take for example a 616e rom which is a closely related to 605f one can by using dos version of mtkflash to rewrite f/w yet the 605f blocks any attempt to ID the  flash prom,  read, write etc. In the past, others, have flashed 616e and 352a roms with 605f f/w and access to the flash is now blocked! There is a method to over come this; it has approx 50% success rate into coaxing a rom loaded with 605f rom to erase  and  flash. If it fails then try again until it does! As the this f/w protection scheme has been relatively successful in slowing f/w hacking this scheme has been implimented 943 and lg drives. This is a guess, there must be a special cmd  ( a reserved cmd) to unlock access to the  f/w to for programs like mtkflash to work. I have loaded 943 f/w onto a 605f rom to see what will happen. Well, the result is the f/w does not block access to the flash so the hardware protection method must be different on the 943 rom! At this stage my method has not tried on a  943 as there is not one at my disposal to experiment on.

[Geremia]

TS-H943 drive does not suffer that, problem is simply about mtkflash that support not all mb chipsets.
On my 616EEB i put an ON/OFF switch to turn on the flash just prior to start mtkflash.

[jumba]

Yes, if you enable the prom after powering up the DVD rom on a random basis the flash prom may or may not be blocked. It would be very interesting if you can replicate an experiment that I carried out a year ago. With 616e loaded  with a double image of the 605f f/w. Using your technique, just as a test do prom check once and then again without depowering the DVD rom. If the first time the prom ID detected repeat this again the second time mtkflash will hang as the access to the prom will be blocked.

[n8thegr8]

dunno if this is out of the ordinary, but I have a asus p5ad2 premium mobo, with ich6, and I just plugged in my drive, while powered from the 360, and mtkflash picked it up and dumped the firmware no problem. no hotswap or switching.

[jumba]

Hmm
Very interesting, well, I stand corrected. Little Stevie is having difficulties with the lg flasher program it seems the lg rom has some protection barriers as in the xbox1 drive. Darkfly, on his 943 had to resort to remove his prom and socket it  so my assumption was there was a similar protection scheme as in the 605f. Will check this out when I can get my hands on 943.  Not familliar with your PC is the IC6 a sata port built in?

[jumba]

accidental post

[n8thegr8]

I built it, the asus is the motherboard. It has a sil3114 controller and a ICH6 controller onboard. I use the ich6 in ide mode and the sil3114 in raid 0 for my 2x250gb hdds (just thought I'd brag a bit, hehe). but yeah, it just picked it up and dumped with no problems whatsoever. I've kinda given up on editing the firmware though, as i'm a total assembly noob, and someone will prolly already have it hacked by the time I can even get this crap figured out enough to start on hacking it. Got the key though, at least there's that, lol.

[Geremia]

Yes, darkfly initially tried mtkflash but i don't know what motherboard he used. I also initially desoldered the flash, but when i tried MS07 fw and saw that mtkflash 1. 83c recognized it, i started investigating.

[Arakon]

n8thegr8: can you confirm that it works on the 3114 controller? because I found some 3114 based cards on ebay but don't want to waste 30 bucks.

[n8thegr8]

aight, I'll try it out tonight and get back

[td360]

I tried it on a si3114 asus board and it did not work! mtkflash comes up with an error reporting that it does not work with the si3114 controller. it does however seem to work on via and intel chipsets i have tested on both.

[Arakon]

are you sure it was 3114? I know it doesn't work with 3112.. now that would suck, in that case I am f***ed unless someone writes a new app or manages to add support to mtkflash. there's no way I am gonna buy an intel MB and CPU just to flash.

[pdmx]

Same here Arakon, I have a Asus ICH7 and mtkflash doesn't work......bad..

[n8thegr8]

ok, tried it with my sil3114, and it did show up as "si3114 Primary Master" in mtkflash, but it would not dump anything, not even with a hotswap (hotswapped the 360 hdd with the dvd drive), it would just sit there until I terminated the program, probably because I didn't have the option of putting it in IDE mode like I did with the ICH6. sorry arakon , but I can assure you that it most definately works flawlessly with the ICH6 chipset.

[Arakon]

hrm
I ordered a SATA-IDE adapter now (SATA device on IDE port), maybe that will function.