Liggy’s and Dee’s BLOG

Due to having two incompatible bootcodes for the Optiarc AD-7170A drive, I added another check to Binflash to issue a warning when trying to flash firmwares to drives that have a non-matching bootcode. Right now flashing will still be allowed but this behaviour may change in future Binflash releases.

Although this change mainly affects Optiarc AD-7170A drives and firmwares most of the available firmware files have been modified to provide the expected bootcode. Firmwares dumped with this Binflash version will be two bytes larger for most drives. This method is compatible with the way that NEC / Optiarc use for releasing firmware updates since the NEC ND-2500A drive. Please note that this new Binflash version will also work with old firmwares, so there is no need to download the firmwares again.

For those of you who have an Optiarc AD-5170S drive, you can now download Binflash version 1.40 that will also support dumping and flashing firmwares on this drive.

M Series Modified Optiarc firmwares released.

M series firmware’s.

The M series firmware’s use a common set of patched writing strategies which are identical for all supported drives. We are able to do this because essentially, all the Optiarc drives are the same hardware. However, each firmware has a unique burn engine to maintain an optimum writing strategy and quality for each model.The M series firmware’s will not enable DVD-RAM or Labelflash support on drives that do not feature these extra’s. 

M series Download links

Please make sure you download the correct firmware for your drive model.  AD-5170A, AD-5170S, Sony AWQ170A and Sony AWQ170S 

AD-7170A, AD-7170S, Sony AWG170A and Sony AWG170S 

AD-7173A, AD-7173S

 NOTES

Special FLASHING instructions.

Boot your PC into Windows Safe Mode of force the IDE controller into PIO mode before attempting to flash a PATA drive. Trying to flash when in normal Windows XP mode may result in a checksum error.

About a week ago, several updated firmwares could be found on Optiarc’s website. But there were not only updates for Optiarc branded desktop drives but also some firmwares for older NEC drives which have not appeared on NEC’s own site so far although they seem to have been compiled some months ago already.

All these firmwares can be found along with bitsetting and RPC1 patches on our site. In detail you can find updates for the NEC ND-3551A (version 2.03), NEC ND-3571A (version 2.11), NEC ND-4551A (version 1-09), Optiarc AD-5170A (version 1.13), Optiarc AD-5170S (version 1.12), Optiarc AD-7170A (version 1.04), Optiarc AD-7170S (version 1.02), Optiarc AD-7173A (version 1-03) and Optiarc AD-7173S (version 1-02).

Please note that only the 4551A, 7170A and 7173A firmwares have been tested by us.