As described on the title.

I don't know what versions of PC-3000 PCI are affected by this and what families of Quantum drives are affected by this as well, but the SIZE of the ROM dumps done by PC-3000 (most likely obtained by RAM dumping) are incorrect.

Example :

PC-3000 PCI ROM dumps posted at hddguru :

http://files.hddguru.com/download/PC-30 ... uantum/AS/

AS205-A2R0600.rar have a ROM bin with 65024 Size while in fact the ROM (loaded to RAM) should be of 128 KB :

EXAMPLE of a ROM from my drive :

http://www.hddoracle.com/download/file.php?id=1935

Just another little detail to take intro account when "playing" with older drives, if you don't want to end up with a bricked PCB.

More Info :

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php? ... 2&start=80

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php? ... &start=100

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Looks like this affects the latest versions of PC-3000 as well ...

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Well ,
I have a lo of these to play around with also

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I assume PC3K is getting the ROM on those drives by reading it's copy loaded on RAM.
If you dump the ROM of a Quantum AS with PC3K you will end up with incomplete ROM code ...

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If you have some time to play with this it would be nice if you could post some Quantum ROMs to compare/verify my findings !

Regards and have a nice week !

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here you go

(taken with PC3K)

ISTM that the ROM is truncated. Spildit's RAM dumps would suggest that the ROM size is 96KB.

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Aha Spildit ,
So you have only the AS series to play around .There were many Quantum Drives ,That were there .

Ps : i meant series

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Ok !

Here is my ROM :





This is my drive :




Now ...

Can you see the problem ?

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Your expected to see something like this at the end of the ROM dumps :



128KB are reserved for ROM on those drives and the ROM on my drive takes 96KB. As your PC-3000 is dumping only 64 your DUMP is truncated at the middle of the code.

If you were to be able to upload that code to the MCU masked flash by VSC or JTAG you would brick the PCB as the ROM code dumped by PC-3000 is incomplete.

Fortunatly for people the PC-3000 doesn't allow for you to write back ROM on those drives otherwise the "BUG" would have already been discovered by the useres who attempted to "flash" those dumps back to the PCBs ...

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I did spen all of my allowance buying sets of douga/genga and figures of my anime "waifus" so i end up without money to buy drives for testing.

But i guess the "Bug" might affect other series of Quantum drives as well ....

Recently i've found out a simmilar problem with the PC-3000 Hitachi-IBM-ARM tool ...

In any case if you have some time to spare just dump some ROMs of your old Quantum drives and post here.

I will check the files for you to see if they are "incomplete" or have the correct size.

That way we can determine the extension of the "problem" ...

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Acelab not so bothered about accuracy of ROM images because they don't know how to upload them

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If the vendor update tools can do it, so can we

Just because Acelab doesn't know how to do it it doesn't mean that it's not possible to do and the last think one would want would be to upload .... incomplete or "damaged" code ...

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I'll admit, I haven't researched this (as I get about 1 Quantum drive every year here) but is it possible that PC-3000 is only reading/writing the portion of the ROM code that's drive specific? Perhaps the rest of the code is relatively generic, so it doesn't bother reading it. Just an idea...

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@Spildit an experiment worth trying.

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Nope ...

PC-3000 latest version is reading 64 KB of a total of 128 KB allocated to ROM, from a total of 96 KB of "Real" ROM code.

If you flash that "incomplete" ROM you will brick the PCB for sure. Not only CRC verification would fail (you would be missing a part of the ROM code) but also the obviouse would happen ....

PC-3000 gets 2/3 of the "Real" code on the "AS" Quantum drive.

Also the Hitachi-ARM tool will get a portion of RAM code instead of ROM code ...

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=31070&start=20

Don't need to be very cleaver to figure out that if you flash any of those "ROMs" on the PCBs you will end up with bricked PCB.

On the case of te Quantum you will be lacking ROM code. On the case of the Hitachi-IBM-ARM you will have ROM+RAM instead of the "NVRam" code (code that normally is on the NVRAM chip) and real "ROM" data ....

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Yes, i would do that but then i guess that i would have to JTAG to the PCB to get it back as my ROM on the Quantum is embeded on the MCU ...

If i flash that PC-3000 file that have 2/3 of the ROM code only on the PCB by the use of "hacked" flasher / vendor update utility or some sort of "Download microcode" then the PCB will be "bricked" and i can't gain direct access to the "ROM" on MCU by VSC so i will have to JTAG to it to get the PCB working again ....

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This might not be very easy to implement because PC-3000 will not write to the Quantum ROM and there is the fact that the "ROM" is on the MCU and it would require some "hacking" of update tools or VSC.

But there is an easy way to test this out.

Get ANY Hitachi-IBM 3.5 drive, including the new ARM based ones that have EXTERNAL ROM chip.

Dump the ROM with PC-3000 latest version.

Write the ROM that you get from PC-3000 to the ROM chip using external programmer (because PC-3000 doesn't write to those ROMs).

- Enjoy your bricked PCB.

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