Need help! iDump freezes after reading MS28 firmware

[jstevenson72]

So I spent about 6 hours trying to get this working last night and I finally gave up from frustration. I bought and installed the SY-VIA-150 NON-raid card and got it installed with the newest 5.20c drivers. I've followed Textbook's guide EXACTLY but every single time it finishes reading the original firmware it freezes up at the screen where it says "Writing drive key to key9-18.txt" It won't go past that. I've tried doing this every possible way I can think of and with all sorts of different firmwares. I even tried using Xtreme Boot Maker and firmware 4.2 but it freezes up at the same location.

btw, I have to use the NTFSCD method because for some reason my motherboard bios doesn't have an option to boot from USB.

Is there maybe a workaround? Because it creates the hacked firmware on my hard drive, it just doesn't go through the checking procedure. Can I maybe run samtool from in windows to check it? Does it even have to go through the checking procedure or could I just go ahead and flash with the hacked firmware it created?

Could somebody please, please help me. I've been pulling my hair out over this because I can not figure it out.

 

[lang]

First thing I would do is open the orig.bin in Firmware Toolbox and make sure it's valid and has your key. If it does then I would run Samtool manually to create hacked fw in Windows. To do this copy samtool.exe, your orig.bin and the hacked fw you want to use to a folder. Then open a command prompt in Windows, switch to that folder and run:

samtool orig.bin xtrem12.bin

You should get a green success message from Samtool if everything goes well.

 

[jstevenson72]

Yeah, I thought about that as an option and that is what I will probably try. My only concern is that when I go back into iDump to flash the hacked firmware, what is going to keep it from freezing up like it does when I try to read the firmware? I really don't want to end up with a bricked DVD drive.

Also, once I create that hacked firmware, where do I need to put it so that iDump uses it when flashing the drive?

Thanks for the help.

 

[lang]

Well, you have a VIA chipset so as long as you have your key saved it's pretty hard to brick a Samsung even if it did freeze on you. You could just re-do it using a USB flash drive instead of NTFS4DOS on another computer or something. Or you could try a floppy if you're REALLY stuck, but do that at your own risk since floppies are unreliable.

Once you create the hacked firmware, the easiest way is probably just to rename it to "hacked.bin" and copy it to the BACKUPS\xxxxxxx\yyyyy folder. Then you can pickup with the tutorial and run the iFlash step.

 

[jstevenson72]

Alright, thank you very much for your help. I'll try that when I get off work and let you know the results.

 

[jstevenson72]

I went home and did what you suggested: Took the orig.bin that iPrep created and then manually flashed it with samtool and the got back into iPrep and flashed the DVD drive and it worked perfectly. Thank you very much for all your help, bigd23!

I still don't know why it freezes when trying to create the new firmware in iPrep. Oh well.