Check my thinking...

[venkman781]

While I think I've got a decent chance of figuring this one out on my own, I wanted to bounce some ideas off the group here. I originally flashed my BenQ to 1.4 last year and still have the backup (thankfully) of the stock firmware. Back then I had a nforce board and was able to flash via on-board SATA without issue, using the 360 as the power source for the drive.

I attempted to reflash my BenQ drive yesterday afternoon using iPrep and ran into some issues. I'm running Vista, 64-bit and installed my VT6421, followed by the latest drivers (5.80c I think) from VIA. When I fired up iPrep to build the USB drive, I noticed the drive showed up as VIA SATA Card - 3249 but built the flash drive anyway with iXtreme 1.6 from xbins.

I powered down the PC, disconnected all of the SATA drives and plugged the BenQ into the rear port on the VIA card (I say rear, as there is a top port, as well). I was able to boot up to the flash drive, powered on the 360 (using the 360 as the power source again), run the dben command and the drive unlocked via Magic28 the first time. I only had the one drive to select from the list (signified by VAD6038), typed R and then 'benOFW.bin' for the filename. The first bank hung for 10 minutes or so, during the reading phase. At this point, I reset the machine and tried again. This time, it went through fine to the successful message. Now comes the tricky part...

I tried the fben command, and was able to get to the drive selection point but the drive would not unlock from what I could tell. Magic28 and the half-open failed (although I may have been too slow on the power cycling for that one to work properly. What was odd was that one or two times I was able to get past the unlock screens to select the drive number, then type W and hit enter, but then I would get the message "Unknown Flash Chip." At no point did it go on to actually erase and write the banks.

After plugging back in my drives, I rebooted into Vista and did a search that lead me to find out that the newer VIA drivers would cause the card to not show up as 6421 but 3249. I uninstalled the drivers and tried rolling back to an earlier version, 5.50b that did ultimately show as a VIA VT6421a in iPrep. I tried rebuilding the USB drive but did not have any luck getting the drive to flash.

At this point, I am thinking that a combination of drivers, Vista and the 64-bit are added headaches, so I have a fresh install of XP on another partition I am going to boot into. I am going to also give Jungle Flasher a try, since I can (theoretically) reflash the drive to my stock firmware, then flash to IXtreme 1.6. I may also try to rebuild the USB drive and try iPrep once again, but that will be a gametime decision.

Would it be possible to brick a drive just by dumping the firmware using the dben command? I want to say No, but I have seen to many weird tech happenings to be looking for any kind of guarantee. And even if I did brick the drive, theoretically I could spoof another drive to use the key using Jungle Flasher, correct? Does anything in the steps above stand out as being glaringly a wrong step? Should I just pull the trigger on buying a connectivity kit and try again when that arrives?

I appreciate any feedback you guys might have. Thanks again for all the hard work to make this even possible...

venk

[dalecheesy]

Technically theres no need to instal the older drivers for the via card as you've correctly ascertained that the newer ones rename it to 3249 which is fine. Your main problem is running a 64 bit os. If you revert back to xp it should go smoothly.