I think I have a bricked LiteOn. I have flashed it three times already and for some reason when I tried flashing it today for LT I had a problem on the 3rd bank. I have tried erasing it and now all I get is the 0x80 or FF80 or FF7F status. I know a million people have asked about this because I have read a million threads, and some got lucky apparently by continuing to power cycle and do l-o-eras.exe or liteon erase in JF over and over until it worked. I have probably done a thousand different combinations and I can't get it to work.
Regardless, that's not my question.
In my fury over this BS not working, I had the nagging feeling that nothing was actually happening when I was entering the commands over and over. So I tried unplugging the SATA cable, thinking it had to do something different, but it gives you the same status! How could it give the same status when it is unplugged? How is it a "FF80" whether or not it is plugged in? This has me thinking that something is just not right. Surely turning the device off or unplugging it should give a different error code, but it doesn't. Same thing happens in both JF and l-o-eras.exe. I also have "No ATAPI device present" in DosFlash.
I am ready to throw my whole damn 360 in the dumpster, but then I read these posts where someone got it working after a million tries by crossing their fingers and doing something illogical.
If anyone is interested, I unbelievably got it working finally. I went to best buy and bought a random SATADVD drive.
-booted up my desktop with the random SATA drive connected and booted to DOS with iPrep.
-ran l-o-eras.exe on that drive 2 times. (The status here varied, but was unimportant apparently. Next steps worked regardless)
-unplugged the SATA and plugged it into my Lite-On (So LiteOn was in the same port this other drive had been in - this is CRITICAL)
-Ran l-o-eras.exe twice - got FF72! (I had tried everything imaginable up until this point, never got 72)
Now from here I tried various combos of power cycling and different DosFlash variations, but if I did anything wrong I had to reboot and go through the process again to get FF72, but the steps to get FF72 worked every single time. Still amazes me. Why the HELL does plugging in another drive affect anything? Seems like a shortcoming in the flashing software to me.... anyways, back on topic.
The magic combo after I got FF72 on l-o-eras.exe, if I remember correctly, was to immediately (without any powercycle or anything else, otherwise you have to start over) do a manual dosflash:
dosflash w (port) 1 A0 2 0 4 C:\(FW file) 0
ANY other option from this point means you have to reboot and start over. To be honest, once I found the trick to get FF72 I knew it was a matter of time until I found the magic combo to get it working. I spent about 13 hours yesterday and never got FF72. I already ordered a new drive, because I was SURE mine was bricked. If you think your is bricked, please try hot swapping in another SATA DVD drive and following my steps. Even a SATA HD WILL NOT WORK, I tried it already!
I hope this saves someone the frustration I had...
$38 on new discs -- Check
$15 on burn after burn that showed as a DVD -- Check
$11 on new laser -- Check
$28 on new multimeter -- Check
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Knowledge from Leerage? -- Priceless
I believe I had the power off, but if the SATA isn't plugged in it shouldn't matter either way. Once you do l-o-eras on the other random SATA DVD drive, plug its SATA cable into you LitOn and power it on. The 2nd l-o-eras from this point should be FF72. If that doesn't work, try leaving it on when you switch, but I don't think it matters.
I do know once you switch the cables you may have to reboot if you mess up somewhere. It seemed like it HAD to be done in the order I said, with the other drive on and plugged in from bootup, then switch. I wasn't able to go back to the other drive, then back to the liteon.
edit: In fact, the more I think about it, I think I had the power on from boot until I flashed. Meaning I never power cycled, never turned the power off at all until I had flashed it and went to unplug it.
