April 21, 2008360 Lite-On Drives Unflashable!?
Posted by The Ori
The newer Phillips & Lite-On drives (for BenQ) have surfaced, and M$ seems to have gone with a ROM instead of FLASH memory. This is what M$ did with the V1.6+ Xbox1 systems so they could not be flashed either.
Info:
MFG Date: April 08
Model no. DG-16D2S
HW Version. A0A1
FW Version. 74850
Here is a pic of the TOP of controller board: The underside is just about blank, just a few parts and connectors. The MT1319L is the drive controller, the chip with the epoxy around it, and is NOT where the firmware is stored. My guess is that U501 is the ROM.
U501 is a drive controller IC. I learned the hard way opening 3 RW drives, that when touched, kill your ODD. Prermanently
Yeah, I should have paid more attention to the numbers on the chip, but anything’s possible. I suppose they placed it in the controller chip, because of the Epoxy there. You should still be able to use a Modchip when/if one is made for the drive.
Joe r. is right, U501 is the controller chip for the motor’s etc. and it’s thermal connected to the housing with an “rubber” pad.
The Firmware is in the MTK (MT1319L). hate to break it to you but MediaTek have been integrating there SPI’s for a while, i believe the first time i saw one was the successor to the Samsung 616E drives…. at that point they werent supported by MTK flash and still to this day aren’t (we cant get flash ID’s if we have no idea what the flash rom is… or even if its masked.
As for the Xbox1 That chip is still flashable but its whats called a Masked ROM meaning we have no idea what it is…. i have seen a 1.6 debug motherboard and they dont have any extra chips (not even extra ram) and they can be flashed between a “standard” bios and debug bios (i say “standard” because the RC4 key is different therefore no signed code runs)…. anyway back to the issue at hand. It would appear that the Liteon IT drives use these chips with embedded SPI. and we arent going to find a firmware updater to be able to theif the FlashID from… also as a side note i believe the only way will be to decap the mt……. i dont know about u but if i find one im not sacrificing one just so everyone can play a few shitty backups i want homebrew
Plenty of work was done on identifying the “Xyclops” in the XB1, where the BIOS was stored, and CANNOT BE ALTERED, as in FLASHED, and you can take that to the bank. That was the only way to stop the on-board flashing, and is NOT masked rom the way you are describing, it is plain ROM with no way to flash it, or alter the code. ROM, even MASKED rom, can’t be changed, that’s why it’s called ROM, and not EPROM, EEPROM, FLASHROM, and so on. Even PROM is a one time write.
Your definition of MASKED rom is incorrect: Mask ROM (MROM) refers to a kind of ROM (”read-only” memory) whose contents are programmed by the Integrated Circuit manufacturer (rather than by the user). The terminology “mask” comes from Integrated Circuit fabrication, where regions of the chip are masked off before during the process of lithography. It has nothing to do with HIDING anything or “masked” in your terminology.
So, the eventuality is, they had to do the same with the XB360 drives. IT won’t stop a modchip, just with the XB1 V1.6 boards, but made sure you can’t flash anything on the board.