LiteOns over Laptop / VIA .... VIA + Drivers - with no freeze?

Oggy

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Last little bit of news before I part...

....

LiteOn + VIA Freeze....


Thing of the past?

Avoiding The Via Freeze And Flashing Liteon With Laptop Pcmcia Made Ea - Scenyx Entertainment Community

shyUK said:
With all the problems I have experienced and have read about via cards freezing and laptop pcmcia via cards freezing I thought this might help a lot of people when flashing their liteon drive.
The answer is the UniATA driver developed by the UniATA team. Their version of the via driver does not poll the drive, it supports many ide and sata chipsets, including Via, Sil, Nforce, Intel etc etc.

Below is a post I made earlier in a UK modding forum, I am posting it here to help people flash their drives with a laptop or help with via drivers freezing your pc. I only own laptops now, in fact all my friends/family have only laptops now, so I couldn't find a PC to flash my drive on, so it was essential for me to be able to flash with a laptop.


Posted earlier on UK modding forum:-

I bought a PCMCIA from fleabay, it is a Pluscom with a Via VT6421A chipset, using jungleflasher .43 beta it extracted the key no problem from my liteon and erased the drive first try.
This is where the problems start, once the drive is in vendor mode it will freeze your laptop, I believe this is due to the via drivers polling the attached drive for device information and the liteon in vendor mode does not reply.

I tried this card on 3 different laptops and every one froze solid as soon as the liteon drive was powered on, I tried every version of Via drivers I could find, but no go.

I didn't want to give up so I started to google for some help, only to be dissapointed to find everyone was suffering the same problem.

I then came across a driver that stated it supported the via vt6421 chipset, so I thought I'd try it, by now I was just about pulling my hair out.

Anyway, the driver is UniATA (Universal ATA Driver for Windows), a big big thank you goes out to the UniATA team for this driver, if you google it, it is easily found.

I downloaded the latest version which is 0.39d, uninstalled the card and removed the via drivers (oem inf file in \windows\inf and viamraid.sys in \windows\system32\drivers), I then tried to install the uniata driver, but no go, it would run the install, list a few via devices, I would select the via vt6421 raid device but the install always failed with bad service in inf, or something like that (I'm using WinXP on an AMD dual core laptop)

By now I was getting desperate, so, what I did was delete the viavmraid.sys file from the via driver setup folder I had on my hard drive and copied the uniata.sys driver there from the uniata driver package and renamed it viavmraid.sys. I then ran the setup again pointing to the via driver setup folder with the "fake" viavmraid.sys.

The install went as normal and I was prompted to reboot. After re-boot a found new hardware box popped up saying that a "UNIATA Management Port SCSI Net Device" had been found, I ignored this and cancelled the driver install, it is not needed. I then looked in my device list and saw the VIA VT6421 PCMCIA card listed in SCSI devices, everything looked ok, resources looked ok.

I then went on to flash the drive with Jungleflasher .43 beta, it worked like a charm first time, absolutely no freeze when I powered on the liteon drive, I loaded my firmware file, clicked on intro/device id, found the chip id no problem, then I clicked on write and it was all over in no time, everything went perfect.

This driver could also be used to prevent via pci cards freezing when flashing liteon drives, as they also poll the drive, a bit of investigation regarding the inf file and it could probably install correctly without using the "fake" viavmraid.sys method, but that method works fine anyway, so I probably won't tinker with the inf files. It also supports SIL chips so maybe the sil pcmcia cards could be used as well, I haven't tried my SIL pcmcia card yet, but I don't really have to now.

So I hope this helps everyone trying to flash with a laptop, the problem is not using pcmcia but the via drivers. This should make life a lot easier for lappy owners like myself.

regards

Shy(UK)

liteonvialaptop.jpg


For the record, a laptop using PCMCIA VIA6421 wouldnt function without drivers....

Now, it has drivers that work.....
 
Nice one, I'll tinker with it later on the 6421 PCI card to see if i can avoid the need to pop the vmraid.sys file in for the Hitachi. If what i read is right the file will remain in the folder allowing access to all drives now?
 
Yes,

new Jungleflasher supports Hitachi over PortIO now so we never needed drivers, it seems very stable and unbricked a few drives in testing.

In my eyes, this is beneficial for Laptop users mainly, but...

Offers an alternative to removing via drivers (although, you need to remove them to use the uniATA ones)
** I havent tried Hitachi using uniATA, doing so is at own risk. **
 
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looking forward to the new jungle flasher when do you think it will be out?
 
When Ive written the user guide and tweaks / bugs are resolved.
 
You clearly have a great talent many thanks for you're endevours.
 
Its not my app ;)

Ive helped create / shape it though and the work of the team involved is fabulous.

Guide should be final this week, if it would stop having features added :p
 
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