Liggy’s and Dee’s BLOG

Binflash version 1.34 has just been made available for download.

Changelog:

• Add flashing of 5540 master firmwares
• Addd dumping of 5540, 5543, 7540 and 7543 firmwares (mostly untested)
• Added routines to create an identification file for unsupported drives
• Support booktype routines on unsupported (new) drives
• Fix check if drive is ready
• Default GUI to extended view

There are new routines to help dealing with unsupported drives. On the commandline please use the option “-identify” to create a text file that helps me adding support for your drives. The GUI will show a dialog if you try to flash or dump the firmware on an unsupported drive, making it possible to create such a file too.

Released 3 new firmwares.

1.O3 for Optiarc AD-7170A

1.S2 for Sony AW-G170A

1.O2 For Optiarc AD-5170A

You can grab them here

Dee’s AD-7173A 1.O2 Modified Firmware.

Original and RPC1 versions available.
Both firmwares features full bitsetting and share the same writing strategies and media speedups.

You can grab it here

Binflash 1.33 has just been released. It fixes the inability to dump 3570, 3571, 4570 and 4571 firmwares.

We have released a whole batch of new modified firmware for the new Optiarc drives.

Optiarc AD-7173A 1-O1 (original and RPC1 versions available)

Optiarc AD-7170A 1.O2 (original and RPC1 versions available)

Sony AW-G170 1.S1 (original and RPC1 versions available)

Optiarc AD-5170A 1.O1 (original and RPC1 versions available)

All these firmwares share the same strategy swaps and speedups (all extracted from the AD-7173A drive)

NOTE
Special FLASHING instructions.
Boot your PC into Windows Safe Mode before attempting to flash. Trying to flash when in normal Windows XP mode may result in a checksum error. You can grab the new firmwares here

It took a while to figure out everything and I guess we still wouldn’t be as far as we are now without TDB. While the first RPC1 firmwares for Optiarc drives have been available for a few days now, there was no way of flashing them to your drives. It took a while to find out how to flash the drives but more about this later.

After some testing we can now announce Binflash version 1.32 which supports the latest Optiarc drives. For a detailled list of supported drives and the complete changelog, check out my Binflash page.

Together with Binflash, I can also announce bitsetting versions for the following firmwares:

• Optiarc AD-5170A firmware 1.11
• Optiarc AD-7170A firmware 1.02
• Sony AW-G170A firmware 1.71
• Optiarc AD-7173A firmware 1-01

You might however encounter problems when trying to flash any of the new firmwares to your drive. Due to a bug in the drives’ bootcode, you may be forced to change you drive to PIO mode. We encountered problems when the drive was in UDMA4 mode, resulting in an error when submitting the checksum. But we also had success when flashing the drive in PIO mode, Windows safe mode and when the drive was attached to a 40 ribbon IDE cable instead of an 80 ribbon cable. The latest Vista release candidate 64 bit version seemed to work even with UDMA mode and 80 ribbon cable. No tests have been made with Mac or Linux however.