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[armyof1ne]

Alright, I have a friend that im trying to help flash a MS25.... He only has a laptop so i ran him around trying to flash with laptop which didnt work, come to find out his chipset wasnt supported(he had a ich-7 but it was a special edition that i had not seen before) So it wouldnt flash. yes we went around and did everything but to no avail. He wants to do it still on his laptop, except he has only an Xpress bay, I have been looking for a while but i have not been able to find a VIA 6421 express card. Is there any way of getting this to function, oh yeah, and he does not have a pcmcia slot.... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/sad.gif)

[gcnd0001]

QUOTE(armyof1ne @ Apr 7 2009, 11:50 PM)

Alright, I have a friend that im trying to help flash a MS25.... He only has a laptop so i ran him around trying to flash with laptop which didnt work, come to find out his chipset wasnt supported(he had a ich-7 but it was a special edition that i had not seen before) So it wouldnt flash. yes we went around and did everything but to no avail. He wants to do it still on his laptop, except he has only an Xpress bay, I have been looking for a while but i have not been able to find a VIA 6421 express card. Is there any way of getting this to function, oh yeah, and he does not have a pcmcia slot.... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/sad.gif)

I believe the only drive that is flashable on a laptop would be the Lite-On(correct me if I'm wrong-possibly the Hitachi?). This would be due to the lack of compatible SATA chipsets on laptops. If you wanted to you could edit MTKFLASH to work with you chipset but you would have to take the laptop apart to flash.

I have successfully flashed every type of drive except for the Lite-On(due to tools which I'm getting), If you would like me to flash it contact me.
3 Ben-Q's + reflashes
2 Sammy MS-25 + reflashes
2 Sammy MS-28 + reflashes
1 Hitachi

[shyUK]

All drives can be flashed with a laptop.
You don't say why flashing didn't work on a laptop, was the drive not accessible, did jungleflasher not work, did it freeze etc.
At the moment I don't know of anyone who has flashed with an express card, I think they are all JMB chipsets, which I have been told most are OEM SIL chipsets, but can't confirm this as I don't have an express card yet, am awaiting delivery.
You can flash with an express card slot by using an express card to pcmcia adaptor, all this info and more is in this thread Avoiding The Via Freeze including alternative drivers for SATA chipsets, ICH7 included.

[armyof1ne]

QUOTE(shyUK @ Apr 8 2009, 08:48 AM)

All drives can be flashed with a laptop.
You don't say why flashing didn't work on a laptop, was the drive not accessible, did jungleflasher not work, did it freeze etc.
At the moment I don't know of anyone who has flashed with an express card, I think they are all JMB chipsets, which I have been told most are OEM SIL chipsets, but can't confirm this as I don't have an express card yet, am awaiting delivery.
You can flash with an express card slot by using an express card to pcmcia adaptor, all this info and more is in this thread Avoiding The Via Freeze including alternative drivers for SATA chipsets, ICH7 included.

looks like you havent flashed from a laptop before... lol... its an ICH7M of course.. What was happening was we were trying to "unlock" the drive multiple ways and since there is only 1 Sata channel... you cant use jungleflash... lol, only way to get that to work is use XP Pendrive edition and load windows through USB key.
Anywho... We tried through DOS and MTK vendor, when resending, would always read as 0x51 and 0xD1, We tried every trick there is and yes it is flashed with Ixtreme 1.5 so it does need to be unlocked becuase of firmgaurd(being that it is a TS-H943)  When i looked more closely into it, The chipset was not supported(Like i said, this is a proprietary ICH7M, not your standard run of the mill which is not supported) by Dosflash(iprep) once i found that out i figured out why it would get the vendor failure.  

 I will have him try the different drivers since i think iprep just copies them and uses the in use drivers.

[hardie]

heres a link
not sure if its going to help at all but maybe worth reading or NOT

http://www.xboxhacker.net/index.php?topic=8244.0
says something about a mini-pci to pci adapter that may be able to use the express card slot for a via 6421 card

and here a link in case you are after this mini pc adapter

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi...8&indexURL=

This post has been edited by hardie: Apr 9 2009, 05:23 AM

[shyUK]

QUOTE(armyof1ne @ Apr 9 2009, 07:11 AM)

looks like you havent flashed from a laptop before... lol...

Wrong, I have flashed all models of drive with laptops, if you read through the thread gcnd0001 believed that only liteon drives could be flashed with a laptop.
I didn't say all drives can be flashed with a laptop by removing your hard drive and using a single channel sata controller, although it should be possible as you can make your own windows live disk with your own added drivers and apps, by using pen drive or bootable cd, dvd.  It should be possible to add jungleflasher, portio32 drivers, uniata drivers, dosflash, firmware etc etc. and have it run just like windows booted from a hard drive.
Most mobile chipsets have exactly the same capability as desktop, just the power conservation is different.
I was asking what you had tried because you just said we went around and did everything, not very much information there.

Easiest method:-

1. insert $10 via pcmcia card into pcmcia slot
or if only express card slot on your laptop then
2. insert $45 express card to pcmcia adaptor into express card slot, voilla you now have a pcmcia slot, now insert the $10 pcmcia via card into your pcmcia slot

For a successful way to have the ability to flash your drive I don't think $55 dollars is a ridiculous amount.
Oh yeah, I hope this has answered your initial question of "he has only an Xpress bay, is there any way to make this functional"

[armyof1ne]

QUOTE(shyUK @ Apr 9 2009, 04:24 AM)

Wrong, I have flashed all models of drive with laptops, if you read through the thread gcnd0001 believed that only liteon drives could be flashed with a laptop.
I didn't say all drives can be flashed with a laptop by removing your hard drive and using a single channel sata controller, although it should be possible as you can make your own windows live disk with your own added drivers and apps, by using pen drive or bootable cd, dvd.  It should be possible to add jungleflasher, portio32 drivers, uniata drivers, dosflash, firmware etc etc. and have it run just like windows booted from a hard drive.
Most mobile chipsets have exactly the same capability as desktop, just the power conservation is different.
I was asking what you had tried because you just said we went around and did everything, not very much information there.

Easiest method:-

1. insert $10 via pcmcia card into pcmcia slot
or if only express card slot on your laptop then
2. insert $45 express card to pcmcia adaptor into express card slot, voilla you now have a pcmcia slot, now insert the $10 pcmcia via card into your pcmcia slot

For a successful way to have the ability to flash your drive I don't think $55 dollars is a ridiculous amount.
Oh yeah, I hope this has answered your initial question of "he has only an Xpress bay, is there any way to make this functional"

From what i understand... PCMCIA to express(vice versa) do not work and cannot flash. Have you done this before. and if so, what items(models and everything) did you use? And i have flashed with my laptop.. mine is a ICH8M that is compatible. My friends laptop has a proprietary ICH7m which isnt compatible(like 5 different versions of the ICH7 are compatible... this one isnt)
And as stated before a Pen drive operation would work as i have already done it before... becuase his chipset is not supported there is no reason in trying. This is why we went the route of finding a working VIA6421 chipset express card which i have now confirmed doesnt exist, They only make PCMCIA's and a converter does not flash correctly(as other people have posted this and i cannot confirm personally).

[shyUK]

I haven't used the converter but I know someone who has with a via 6421a pcmcia card (pluscom), it flashed a liteon in windows no problem using UniATA driver, it was £30 delivered from Hong Kong, he says all his pcmcia cards work perfectly in the converter, even a 56k dial up pcmcia fax/modem.

I haven't come across any posts where users say they have tried a converter and failed, but, even with a Via 6421 card, wether using the converter or not flashing straight off is normally not possible using the via drivers, this is maybe why you heard flashing does not work with a converter, the via drivers poll the attached drives, once the drives are erased and in vendor mode they normally freeze your laptop, and you can't drop down to dos, even with cardservices for dos installed your pcmcia card will not be available, that's where the UniATA drivers come in, they do not poll the attached drives and allow flashing with a via card without any freeze.

Liteon drives can be especially problematic, but all drives can freeze with via drivers, here is a quote from the thread I posted the link to in my first reply to you, concerning the UniATA drivers:-

Quote : Had a samsung drive that was so problematic it would freeze my pc in dos. Had never encountered anything like it. In windows I could not get past vendor intro. Decided to try this out, loaded the drive up in windows on the first try! Unbelievable, I was finally able to pull the keys from it. /Quote

Concerning the ICH7M chipset, I don't know why it failed to flash, I have not used this chipset to flash a drive, but there are things you can try, like changing install strings for the chipset to report as a standard ICH7, you can even change vendor ids in the install ini file to install a different driver, there are normally always work arounds.  I can't confirm anything definite about this particular chipset, but mobile chipsets normally have the same capability as desktop, they are just designed to be more conservative with power usage.

I think if you made a winxp live disk with necessary tools and played around with driver installs for the ICH7M it should flash if other ICH7 are capable.

[armyof1ne]

well unfortunetly that might be a little too advanced for him, he is learning, but thats kinda a large leap for someone thats just semi-starting out, ill see what i can do, and i will look into the universal sata drivers, that may be the key to this.