Upgrade Liteon lvw-5045 to 400G successfully

[bithead9]

Well if you decide to never use it again. Consider selling it on Ebay. There are pleny of people
willing to buy a use 5045 with no macro and rcp1. They will replace the DVD mech or repair the laser and
it will be good as new. Of course in a few year the tuner will be obsolete. You will however likely be able to copy any S-video and RCA from any other device. Including some TV's have svideo out. Mine does and I can pump Blueray or HD broadcast thru to my Litey!

[frank1218]

Bithead - I would certainly agree with your last comment about purchasing 'unwanted' 5045s !! In any event, I am working on some modifications which will hopefully result in the successful use of 1TB drives. What I need to know is how to engineer the CHECKSUM to EB5A. Using the 5045s code 160GB default as an example, in the field x'78142000', x'1420' represents 05152 sectors and this logic extends to the other values we discussed for zapping the code. My assumption here is that the leading x'78' and trailing x'00' are used during the CHECKSUM process but have little or no value in the actual execution of the code. Is this assumption correct ? Is the manipulation of these leading and trailing bytes strictly to accomodate CHECKSUM generation or are there other factors at play ? I'm trying to get some new sector values to work and getting the CHECKSUM correct is driving me nuts !!

[bithead9]

Frank, The x'EB5A' checksum is the 16 bit checksum of the entire file. If you use winhex or a similar util that calulates the 16bit style checksum you can simply change the values you like in the firmware for the drive sectors. Then tweak the 78 value to achieve the proper checksum. If you do not get EB5A as the result then the Liteon will NOT flash the firmware to the unit. It will go thru MANY step and % updating and then say FAILED. It does not harm the Liteon but is a colossal waste of time. The values I figured that will SUM are as follows:
Theoretical and working for 5045: (16 bit checksum EB5A all bytes) offset +247e9e

$'78142000' 172GB 05152 sectors 172,872,433,664 bytes (ORIG VALUE)
$'78250000' 317GB 09472 sectors 317,827,579,904 bytes
$'78340000' 446GB 13312 sectors 446,676,598,800 bytes works!
$'1E3F4F00' 507GB 16207 sectors 543,816,679,424 bytes works MikeB value
$'5D4F4000' 632GB 20224 sectors 678,604,832,768 bytes
$'5C500000' 640GB 20480 sectors 687,194,767,360 bytes
$'1E7E1000' 1006GB 32272 sectors 1,082,868,629,504 bytes NEW TEST Jul 09
$'3C3F3100' 505.5GB 16177 sectors 542,810,046,464 bytes working MAX Me
$'78430000' 536GB 17152 sectors 575,525,617,664 bytes
$'68440000' 544GB 17408 sectors 584,115,552,256 bytes works!
$'58540000' 672GB 21504 sectors 721,554,505,728 bytes works!
$'48620000' 784GB 25088 sectors 841,813,590,016 bytes
$'38710000' 904GB 28928 sectors 970,662,608,896 bytes
$'307C0000' 1065GB 31744 sectors 1,065,151,889,408 bytes works!
$'2c800000' 1TB 32768 sectors 1,099,511,627,776 bytes

the original value of "78 1420 00" is the default TIMER/SLEEP value x78=120minutes
the x1420 is the sectors 5152 sectors the x00 I do not know. But changing this for
the checksum does not hurt anything. It may be a slack byte, who knows?

Hope this helps!
BTW - thechecksum values are even/odd pairs - you will see as you change them how it works.

[frank1218]

Bithead - Just a quick update as it's really late. I resolved the CHECKSUM issue by setting the x'78' to x'00' because I needed to accomodate a sector field as close to x'7470' (29808) as possible. This is the sector calculation I developed for the new HDS 1TB drive I am using. Setting the field to x'00743800' it checksumed to EB5A. The x'7438' is 29752 sectors which is just under what I was shooting for and I will only lose just under 2GB off the total capacity of the drive. So assuming a sleep timer default of 0 is acceptable for a code load, I expect this will work. I can just reset the sleep timer back to 120 minutes during setup. I'll let you know how it goes over the next few days. I also have an update on another LiteOn optical drive which I will include next time. As always, thanks for your input.

[bithead9]

Zero is fine. It is recommended that after flashing the Liteon you power down the unit. I am guessing the original value of 120 (x78) was intended that the liteon power down after the flash update. You do not need to change the sleep setting after the flash. It turns out that was very helpful to allow the sector tweaks to work in conjunction with the checksum of the file. Do let us know how testing goes. Good luck!

[frank1218]

It looks like the x'00' setting for the sleep timer was indeed acceptable for the code load. I ran an ERASE on the drive which was successful and from the looks of the available recording times in different modes, pretty much the entire drive is available. I set the machine to HQ and left it on recording all day as a 'burn in' test of the new drive. There are a number of other tests I will be doing over the next several days to validate the 1TB drive and I will track the results and report them. Tonight I expect to connect the drive to my notebook to futher validate the drive format from a WIN-XPP prospective. As I mentioned in my last posting, I expect to see only around 2GB of the drive unallocated. If there is anything in particular you think I should test or interogate, please feel free to mention it. By the end of next week I expect my final test to be a full saturation use of the drive which in HQ mode should take 10 to 12 days to complete. This will verify that the entire drive can indeed be utilized and referenced.

The optical drive that I mentioned I installed was a LITEON IHAS324-98. The noise level of the drive is somewhat higher than I would like but all the functions seem to work fine. The only issue I have seen when playing a DVD is that sometimes there is a small amount of 'dropout' of the digital image after a fast forward or chapter forward operation but it clears up in a few seconds. I suspect this is a buffering issue which may or may not be related to the IDE/SATA bridge I am using on the optical drive. This is the same bridge I was using on the disk drive at first which I think may have created some issues. This bridge is a KINGWIN brand (I think) while the one currently on the disk drive is a SABRENT which seems to be working fine.

I will keep the forum informed of my test results as things progress. On an earlier topic, is there any source we know of where it might be possible to pick up some used 5045s ? I would love to get another machine or two at a reasonable price if I could. They are a blast to play with !! I am thoroughly enjoying this experience.

[bithead9]

Sweet! I have enjoyed playing and hacking up my Litey. But I have a few comments. 1) When checking the drive space I could not see the whole drive in Windoze. You may need to use Partition magic or some disk util to actually SEE the data / free space - it seems that Windows falls all over this LITEONFAT format. I do not know why. 2) You need to FILL the drive entirely to make sure that you can still delete and record after deleting. 3) You need to unplug the unit without powering down first. This will force the Litey to do a SCANDISK at boot. That may take a while for a 1TB full drive. This was where my 640GB drive hung up. (But I think I may have not let it run the course. My bad. I want to retest) Now you are testing! I am eager to hear how this goes for you. Good luck. What sector size did you finally flash the firmware with ?

[frank1218]

Using all the values you supplied as groundwork, I went through the math and figured that more often than not; TOTAL DEVICE BYTE COUNT divided by TOTAL SECTORS = 33,554,432 bytes/sector. I took the total byte count for the HDS drive on the spec sheet and divided it by 33554432 with a result of 29808 (with a remainder) sectors. I could not use 29808 (x'7470') because it would not CHECKSUM correctly so I reduced the least sugnificant byte (x'70') until it did with x'38'. So x'7438' (29752) sectors is what I used.

I had already run into the situation with WIN where it doesn't accurately report anything more than around 500GB on the LITEON device. I have another partition tool that I used to get the real stats when I flashed the machine using your 904GB numbers. The UNPLUG test was on my list of things to do. I really think the base of alot of the issues is that FAT32 was never designed to handle this kind of capacity. The FAT that is created is close to 5GB in size so you can imagine what it must take to scan and verify it. I'm sure it must cause other issues as well, not only internally with file mgmt but also with the LITEON OS. I came home tonite to find the drive on but not recording and no record of the recording I had started before I left this morning. I am now retrying the process again this time putting a couple of small recordings on first before starting the more lengthly one.

Have you attempted going through initialization on a clean drive, copying the directory tree off to a different device, reformat the drive to other than FAT32 (like NTFS) and copy back the directory tree ? it's likely it wouldn't work but I was just curious as to whether or not you might have attempted something like that. I'm also looking at the data contained in the directory tree itself which looks like it might be some type of an indexing structure into the MVxxxx folders it creates for each recording. Determining the method used could be useful when copying recordings from the old to the new device via a PC. Without the proper info in the directory tree, the copied data is inaccessible. I tried doing a DEFRAG after copying data onto the drive via a PC but it wasn't consistantly successful. What we could really use is a new OS on these old dogs !! One that we could communicate with from a PC (like using Telnet) could have alot of possibilities. I picked up an Iomega Screenplay Pro about 2 months ago which has that capability but I haven't had the time to even begin to play with it yet ... been kinda hung up on the LITEY.

[bithead9]

If the IHAS324-98 is too noisy. You might be able to download a utility from TDB (tdb.rpc1.org) that will let you tweak the speed settings. In this case you want to SLOW it down for quietness. Never tried that but it may also help the artifacts ? I know that normal IDE (PATA) drives (if you can find them from Liteon) work the best as replacement DVD mechs.

[bithead9]

Dang. I was hoping to hear of success on that UNPLUG. It may simply be that 512GB is the max that the liteon can deal wit in the FAT or the scandisk/defran routines....hmmm.

[frank1218]

I haven't as yet tested the UNPLUG with my latest HDS 1TB flash so don't give up hope on that one just yet. I'll give that a shot sometime later today ......

[bithead9]

Frank, When you formatted the 1TB drive. How may HOURS on each mode did you have ? (HQ/SP/LP/SLP)
That is a tell-tale indicator of firmware support too. If It formatted the whole drive in LITEONFAT it should show in excess of 200 hours on HQ mode.

[frank1218]

Well, I have some good news and some not-so-bad news. I ran into a variety of situations where the HDS 1TB flash was coming back with error codes so I went back to your 904MB version of the code which I had some measure of success with before. I ran a number of tests and so far it looks ok. Even the UNPLUG test completed a rescan in less than two minutes without an error but this is with only a few hours of recordings on the drive. The stats after an ERASE at the 904MB version look like this: HQ-220HR09MIN; SP-434HR49MIN; LP-643HR09MIN. These numbers would appear to make sense but numbers which appear in other displays are completely erroneous like the recording time available in the gray bar at the top of the screen is usually way too low. I'm going to continue testing with this version. It may well be that this is the practical maximum limit the code is capable of handling. If this turns out to work ok, it's more than acceptable to me. It leaves only about 27.5 GB of the drive empty which I can live with given 904GB of capacity.

[frank1218]

BTW, before I forget, the zap for the 904GB zap has to be corrected to x'3B710000'. The original x'38710000' does not CHECKSUM correctly. For whatever reason, given the results we've seen to this point, 29000 sectors may be a logical limit. Every version that I have tried (including my own for the HDS 1TB) that exceeded 29000 logical sectors has failed to work properly. The 904GB version is just under that at 28928 sectors and so far, so good.

[bithead9]

Yeah. I must have fat fingered the 28928 hex value. that would never checksum. My bad.
So far you have good news. Lets see what happens when that puppy gets full. I know that at 512GB
I can delete stuff and scandisk and unplug with no issues. It will be nice to see your results. I am now "chomping on the bit" for your results .

[frank1218]

Well, it will probably take the better part of two weeks to complete the testing. I figure running on HQ continuously will take a little over 9 days to fill it but under realistic conditions the drive wouldn't run for that length of time. I'm going to give it some breaks in between to allow it to cool down before I start up the next recording 'segment' of the test. I will be performing UNPLUG tests at steps along the way so should there be a failure of some kind at least we will have an idea of how far it got before we took a hit.

[bithead9]

You can use the disk COPY feature to copy a DVD to the HDD over and over. That takes up 4GB at a time in way less time than recordings... But recording for like 10-12 hours on HQ for week will def. do the trick. That will testout the counters for number of recordings and the like. If this goes well I might just order 1 TB drive to use. I have not filled my 512GB one yet Once again good luck!

[frank1218]

Actually, I have been thinking for awhile of building a bit of an audio library (WAV on HDD) but didn't get into it much because I didn't want to consume space on the 160GB drive that could be used for video instead. With the 1TB, I could use half the drive for audio and still have plenty of space for video. If the Litey could read CD info like WMA does when it processes files so the album and song titles were automatically loaded during the copy rather than having to input them manually, it would be great !!! Oh well, guess you can't have everything ...

[frank1218]

Unfortunately, I have some bad news. I put about 50hrs of HQ recordings on the HDS 1TB flashed to 904MB. Last night I attempted an UNPLUG test which I had done successfully a number of times before with less data on the drive. Last night, the scan completed in under 4 mins but when it did everything on the HDD was gone. As best I can calculate, this was probably close to 25% of the drive capacity and the rescan of the drive wiped out the recordings. At this point, I'm not sure what to do. I have a 500GB drive which I can pull out of a desktop machine I have and try going with one of the other flash versions that you seem to have more success with. You may have been right when you said it could be that a 1TB drive just will not work. My first attempt to use it was with one of the smaller flash versions and I think I still had some issues with it. Oh well, back to square one !! Can you tell me again which flash version you had the most success with on your 512GB drive ?

[frank1218]

I was also under the impression that MV was disabled in all these flash versions we have discussed but I tried something last night and that doesn't appear to be the case.

[bithead9]

The 512GB firmware was from MikeB's site. As for MV well if you used the stock 204 and that does not have the MV patch. Just run Mr Wizzards tool on the fw and it will either patch it or not. If it will NOT then mv is already disabled. The front RCA inputs and the tuner definatly should allow recording anything. Now if you tried to to d DVD dub to the svideo or rca (back of unit) that will prob say copy protected. DVD's have CPRm and Macro. So even if the Litey does not pass the MV it will pass the CPRM signals and hose you over.
There is a remote possibility that if you were running 197 (or older) that CPRM did not properly support the DVD protection and will allow the copy...hmmm.

[frank1218]

Bithead - I used your 507GB flash to set up my 500GB drive and it used the entire drive. I compared that flash file to Mike's 512GB flash and they appear to be identical which includes the MV patch. The 507 level resulted in: HQ:112H54M; SP:223H00M; LP:329H51M which is about what I expected to see. After some initial testing (including the UNPLUG test) I ran another ERASE to clear the drive then connected it to my notebook. I was able to successfully copy everything off of the original 160GB drive which was accomplished by deleting the HDD_VIDEO folder from the new drive and copying the original HDD_VIDEO folder from the old drive. This copies not only the vedio files themselves but the underlying directory structure which appears necessary given the softwares design. The files under HDD_VIDEO are used as a database or index of a sort to track and locate the files it creates. Once this operation was complete, the drive was reconnected to the 5045 and appeared to perform normally. I am still doing some testing but fairly comfortable this drive will work fine. As we eluded to before, the 1TB drive appears to be too far ahead of the architecture of the machine.

[bithead9]

So the 1TB would work as a 512GB (or 507GB) firmware-wise. Too bad it cannot be larger. That was Mike B's initial thought. That the 512GB as a practical limit in the firmware. I guess his hypothesis was correct.
When I have time I will retest the 640GB drive. (out of sheer curiosity) it will likely fail after the 512GB limit
as your 1TB unit did... thanks for the update. Best for folks to look for a 500gb or so drive when updating the 5045 units.

[vis2008]

OK check the Google techassist link again. I put 197USRevB.ZIP
and 197USRevA.ZIP up there.

bithead9,
sorry if this is off topic, but earlier in the thread you posted these 2 firmwares.
I found the hacked firmware at the recommended site, and it is 197USRevB.ZIP hacked version.

What are the differences between the 197USRevB.ZIP
and 197USRevA.ZIP versions? Do I need to pick one, REv A or B, based upon my machine or current firmware?
(I seem to remember needing to match the hacked firmware versionto my existing firmware version when I did this modification to the 5005).

BTW, anyone find important bugs that were fixed after the 197 firmware? Seems like a lot of people like the 197. I've already upgraded the DVD drive, so compatibility with faster discs is not an issue.

Thanks everyone.

[bithead9]

The REVA/REVB versions are hardware related (I think). On the back of your Liteon there is a serial number and model. If it says REV.B then you use the 197revb firmware. If not you are REVA. The 0204 level is stable too and supports BOTH revs. So there are no questions. I only provided the 197 reva/b so folks can put back what they had in case of a problem with 0204. These are all USA firmwares. If you really want 197 fw with a bigger HDD then we can hack that up for you to get up to 512GB like the rest.

[frank1218]

Bithead - Any idea how to get around the problem of repetative 'WRITE FAIL' when initiating a recording ? On a manual recording, I hit the record button again after the 'WRITE FAIL' and the recording starts. The timer recording function is virtually useless now because the operation takes a 'WRITE FAIL' and shuts down the machine. As you may recall, I upgraded my 5045 to a 500GB drive and loaded Mike B's 0204 code hacked to 507GB. Any ideas ?

[bithead9]

I must say I've never heard of that problem. You are using a newer HDD so could it be that it is going into power sleep mode ? Then when you hit it again it works? See if the drive you installed has a jumper for power save mode to bypass. I know that the HDD in mine is constantly spinning unless the Liteon itself goes to SLEEP mode. BTW - sorry for the late reply. I have not been checking this forum often.

[mikemos]

Hi All,

New to This but it seema that the LiteOn IHAS122 is difficult to source, would any one know if the
LiteOn IHAS124 or LiteOn IHAS324 or the LiteOn IHAS 424 has superceeded the LiteOn IHAS122.

on a different note what about the LiteOn DS 8A3S as it is a slim line unit.

I would be greatful for any advise or help that can be given on this.

kind regards to all.

[bithead9]

Mike, It is increasingly difficult to find replacement DVD drives. I'd say that just about ANY Liteon IDE unit will work for general use. Some will have a problem during PLAYback and using FF (fast forward). If you can live with that problem thay all work (that I have tested). The adapter to SATA is a little more dicey. You may or may not get a good sata converter and you may or may not get a good compatable drive with the 5045. This will probably work: http://www.amazon.com/Lite-IHAP222-06-WRITER-SOFTWARE-INTERFACE/dp/B0021EX5HS
It is PATA (IDE) and if it tests OK I'd say to order another one or two for future repairs. At the very least you coudl sell them or use in a PC for DVD burning, etc. This will prolly work too: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827106281&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_m...-On-_-27106281

Please report back what you do so others can benfit from your experiences. BTW - none of the new drives you buy will fit perfectly. You will need to either not use the front tray cover or trim the tray on the new unit to make the tray cover fit. It is also very likely you will need to find a new way to attach the drive inside the Liteon. Since the original units wer not a metal case. But were plastic and had downward attaching screws. I used a thin piece of sheet metal bent like "L" shape and attached the bottom and then attached to the normal side rails of the new drive. That works pretty well. If I get a chance to take a picture I will. Its lots of fun to hack your 5040 or other liteon recorders. Hope you have fun too! And certainly either post back any questions or email / pm me as needed!

[bithead9]

Mike, It is increasingly difficult to find replacement DVD drives. I'd say that just about ANY Liteon IDE unit will work for general use. Some will have a problem during PLAYback and using FF (fast forward). If you can live with that problem thay all work (that I have tested). The adapter to SATA is a little more dicey. You may or may not get a good sata converter and you may or may not get a good compatable drive with the 5045. This will probably work: http://www.amazon.com/Lite-IHAP222-06-WRITER-SOFTWARE-INTERFACE/dp/B0021EX5HS
It is PATA (IDE) and if it tests OK I'd say to order another one or two for future repairs. At the very least you coudl sell them or use in a PC for DVD burning, etc. This will prolly work too: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827106281&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_m...-On-_-27106281

Please report back what you do so others can benfit from your experiences. BTW - none of the new drives you buy will fit perfectly. You will need to either not use the front tray cover or trim the tray on the new unit to make the tray cover fit. It is also very likely you will need to find a new way to attach the drive inside the Liteon. Since the original units wer not a metal case. But were plastic and had downward attaching screws. I used a thin piece of sheet metal bent like "L" shape and attached the bottom and then attached to the normal side rails of the new drive. That works pretty well. If I get a chance to take a picture I will. Its lots of fun to hack your 5040 or other liteon recorders. Hope you have fun too! And certainly either post back any questions or email / pm me as needed!