I'm requesting help for flashing my BenQ drive. I've gone through tons of forums and they've gotten me to the point I'm in now. I can't seem to find information that would get me further, what either means that this is a dead end or then the last step until I succeed, since people are usually too busy to post the information online after they achieved their goal.
I'm requesting help for flashing my BenQ drive. I start by telling what kind of hardware/software I'm using:
Xbox 360: Falcon motherboard
BenQ VAD6038 DVD drive
Laptop hardware: Acer Aspire 5610 (1,6GHz, 2Gb)
PCMCIA SATA card with VIA 6421 chipset(On Device Manager shows up as VIA RAID Controller - 3249)
- On a side note, this PCMCIA card has two SATA ports at FBD0 and FBC0. I'm using the FBD0 one, since it's the one showing first in the I/O listing in System Information.
Software: Windows XP SP3
Dosflash v1.6
I have a SATA cable running from my PCMCIA card to the BenQ SATA port. BenQ is getting it's power from Xbox 360 and I control that with the power button on 360.
If You need more information about my system please ask.
I'm sorry that this posting is quite long. I'm trying to give as much information as possible at this point to hopefully get the most accurate help. I've been spending few days on this now and I tried to go through forums to find help with no luck. I'm quite positive people have done this flashing with this setup, but when they have, they haven't taken the time to post the success story online. I'm sorry if I'm missing something obvious and please let me know if I am.
I represent my conclusions and questions at this point and give more details on them beneath. So, before commenting the conclusions or giving answers to the questions please check the rest of this post to receive more details! My current state with my project can be found from section C2.
Here's my conclusions so far and please correct me if You think I've overlooked something. Please check the rest of this post for more information.
C1: I have to go with Dosflash32 v1.6
C2: Dosflash32 does communicate with the BenQ drive
C3: Timing plays an important part in switching the Xbox 360 on and off.
C4: I'm going to use this setup to flash my BenQ.
My questions so far, please answer any if You have ideas. Please check the rest of this post for more information.
Q1: Is there a Tutorial on how to flash BenQ with a laptop using PC Card (PCMCIA) SATA card? (Plenty of information about flashing BenQ with a desktop computer, but I need a guide for laptop.)
Q2: Should windows detect the Benq DVD drive of the Xbox 360? (My windows doesn't react to it any way)
Q3: Can Xbox 360's own power system be used with flashing BenQ with a laptop? Q4: Is there a listing of the Dosflash status codes somewhere (0x80, 0xFF, 0xD1 etc.)? (Knowing them might help in solving the problem)
Q5: Can You think of anything I've overlooked or doing something fundamentally wrong?
C1: Seems that I have to do this flashing with Dosflash32, since that's the only way that has shown me some light in my efforts. I understand doing it by booting to DOS would be a better choice, but I'm quite doubtful of making the 32bit PCMCIA card working in 16bit DOS. I've tried to make an USB bootdisk and then disabled HDDs and ODDs physically (detached the devices). Note that the BIOS of this laptop is up to date (v3.50) and offers very little options for anything. Auto mode states that there's no ATAPI Devices Present and manual mode hangs firmly at 0xFF. I get the same result when I try to run Dosflash16 under command window in XP as well.
C2:The furthest I've gotten at this point is to get Dosflash32 to regognize the BenQ drive. I managed to get the information of the drive to Dosflash32 by using the built in Magic 28 unlock method. When I tried to read the flash it hanged at Reading Bank 0 and the green "power on" light in Xbox was blinking the way it does when You eject the drive. When nothing else happened in 10 minutes or so I turned the Xbox off and on again with no change in anything. At least this proves that there is a connection and communication between my laptop and the BenQ drive and this makes me believe that it can be done. At this point even if I managed to do it by pure luck I wouldn't care.
C3: Dosflash32 fails to do the Magic 28 method unless the console is turned on a few second before starting up Dosflash32.
C4: I would love to use a desktop computer to get this over with, but my nearest friend with that kind of computer lives 3000 miles away. I live on countryside and I don't want to keep ordering different pieces for my project here in hope to make it work. I know it can be done.
it will flash just the same as if you were using a desktop i would assume. make sure that you can use that card to set boot orders and what not and just boot into dos and run your commands.
when you plug it into your computer and turn the xbox on it should detect a new drive. if not, then thats the start of your problem, you have to make sure that windows will at least see the drive.
Don't know if this would help as this was for a Sammy drive.
It wasn't possible to use dos to perform the flash as I could not get my PCMICA card to work within a DOS environment, so I had to use windows environment and I used DOSFLASH 32 I think. I also had to use the 0800 enable disk to make windows recognise the 360 drive, without that disk windows would not recognise my drive to flash. After that it was quite easy. From what I have read previously it isn't possible to use a PCMCIA card in DOS, I tried to use IPREP and a few others none would work, if I'm wrong on this please feel free to correct me, i'm just trying to help.
I did find a guide for the Sammy with a laptop, wasn't easy to find, it took me far longer to find out how to perform the flash then the actual flash took to perform.
If you want I can upload the guide but it is for a Sammy and needs the use of the 0800 disk and I'm not sure if that disk would work a on BenQ drive. Maybe someone else would have more info on that.
Alright I've been "lurking," on these boards like many people just reading about how to flash, well now I think I've read enough, watched, etc. I would like to know all in all what materials I would need to flash a beng drive with this laptop. (http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-list.pl?mdl=VGNFS740W). I don't know what drive and stuff I will need from this too. I modded my ps2, and I've open my 360 before too, so I mean what I need with the drive and addons to my comp? So I would like to know if what i have would be good enough, what more i need, and is there a tutorial for doing a flashing of the Benq with a laptop?
