tl866 a

Did you remove the ROM or did you try with the chip on the PCB with CLIP ?

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Well, in any case i'm sure that your ROM dump contains RAM data (you just need to check with hex editor to find RAM there...)

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with the clip

already notified acelab

Ok, maybe that is the reason - the clip.

You will have to remove the chip from the PCB if you want to read it.

Clip method doesn't work with all brands of PCBs. It can be used with WD but fails with other brands.

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Oh, I didn't actually compare the files. Just was going off of what you said and assumed you meant the NVRAM.

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If you are reading the SPI flash chip in-circuit with an SOIC clip, then you can't be reading the SDRAM at the same time.

IIUC, the ROM_PCB_ONLY.bin file is a dump that was obtained with a chip clip, while the ROM59.bin dump was obtained via PC3K. The latter looks like it may be a RAM dump. I don't think you can rely on a RAM dump to obtain a copy of the ROM. That's because ROM code is often unpacked into RAM before it is executed, and even if it is not unpacked, the code can still change in some other way.

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The OP can't read the chip with the clip.

Both ROM dumps were done with PC3K, one with the drive connected the other one just with the PCB, or so i think...

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the OP is you



correct

Thanks !

I guess that now i do understand a little better the Hitachi-IBM drives !

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the answer i got from ACELAB:

"I asked our Hitachi developer about this, he told me that you really got not pure ROM but it doesn't matter, if you will write this to chip HDD will work fine."

Hello !
Too bad that you can't use your eeprom programmer to test this, because i'm pretty sure that it wouldn't work.
The ROM chip doesn't have just that ROM code, there should be what's inside the NVRAM chip as well, a copy of it on the ROM,
IF you write the dump that you have to your ROM chip you will replace the portion of the chip with the copy of the NVRAM with junk from the incorrect dump...

Most likely drive will not spin at all.

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don't worry, will continue the experiment/investigation and report here

Does pc3k allow you to WRITE to ROM ? I don't think so, because if there were to exist a VSC to access ROM directly they wouldn't be reading that code from RAM.
So, while it can be of use to compare pcb code in particular when it's on the MCU, you can't use those dumps to programm a ROM chip even with external programmer, because even if the Rom chip starts with that ROM code the external ROM chip will have aditional code like a copy of the code on NVRAM.

If you were to "patch" a ROM file with your ROM DUMP by copy it's entire code to a valid ROM chip dump done with a programmer on a ROM chip, the RAM portion of the dump would over-write the space on the rest of the ROM chip dump...

And i bet you would brick the pcb.
.

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Please do !
I will be looking forward for it.

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Now that i think better about it i supose there could be some sort of download microcode function to update the firmware, and there might be possible to implement a way to write the ROM dump to the ROM chip, but you would end up with a bricked pcb if you were to write that dump with RAM code on the ROM chip anyway...

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i don't know what to tell you about it, like i wrote before, acelab says that shouldn't be a problem to write the dump back

you know what, another thing to investigate:

if this dump can be written on the chip, but i wouldn't do that before i have a copy made by a programmer, in case things go wrong (as you think).

Does PC-3000 allow you to WRITE to the ROM chip (not the NVRAM) ?



I think that there is an easy way to figure out if the drive will be bricked or not, if PC-3000 allows you to write to ROM !

Spildit VS Acelab match one !!!




Also i'm very happy to have someone like you really investigating stuff and doing experimentations.

I will attempt to dump the chips on my test Hitachi-Ibm drives with a programmer as well and will post what i find.

Also you might want to read this

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=1236

Regards.

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The only way for the PCB/Drive not to be bricked by this, and assuming PC-3000 can write to the ROM chip would be for it to write just the correct lenght of the CODE and replace only the start of the data on the flash ROM chip.

If the PC-3000 write to the chip the same lenght of data that you have on your dump, or if it does a electronic erase of the flash chip then it's game over.

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I'm beginning to think you are beating ACELAB

there no such option to write ROM at least i cant find it