Nekochan Net

Hello all. About an year ago the ancient 4x CDROM in my O2 ceased reading any more and I replaced it with Toshiba XM6201 (I've got it cheap on ebay), worked great except the audio disks - awful quality, noise, jitters, etc. I noticed it sports very old firmware so I finally decided to flash it (yesterday picked up version 1042). At first things went good - it flashed OK and the audio disks started playing correctly...

But then I saw the actual severity of the situation. After about several hours of idle the drive stopped executing most SCSI commands (got respose to inquiry) on the same bus the system drive resides... And bus reset, and failure, and bus reset, and failure... Reboot... It works... Several hours idle and the same nasty thing... The next surprise was it wouldn't like to flash with older version of the firmware (1037) but only with 1042 so I had to open the drive, take out the flash memory chip from its socket and reprogram it in flash programmer... The drive looks fine now, things work like with the 1042 firmware, no problems for the last couple of hours at least...

So it looks that some 6201 drives would't accept 1042 firmware. Notice that the hex file was correct, the checksum et cetera. I don't think it was a bad flash either as the drive worked fine for some time and the dump from the chip was the same as the hex file.

UPDATE:

Nope, no luck. The same symptomps with version 1037. Looks like my O2 will stay without CDROM. The device works for a while (several hours) and then simply stops. Inquiry and eject work, but nothing else, as if there is no media in drive. I think something went very wrong with this CDROM and my ideas do end here. Any suggestions?

POSTSCRIPTVM
The drive works perfectly well with FreeBSD and Adaptec 2940...

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LAMMEN GORTHAUR

I've seen other odd things kinda like that before, but still...

WEIRD! :scratch:

The case is closed, the CD-ROM works perfectly now :)... And once again the SGI support failed miserabley :(. I asked them for a copy of their firmware for that drive yet they sent me several (idiotic) steps how to check if I have CD-ROM in my system, if my mediad is working and things like that... Weird...

Well, I contacted Toshiba and they solved the opened case the same day. It happens that there are 3 models XM-6201, namely B, TM and one rare, named either B or TM (I didn't ask how to distinguish that one). Two of them share the same firmware, and the third has its own, which is incompatible with the other two. The rare drive may or may not work with the firmware of the other two (well, in my case it didn't work with the O2, but worked with the peecee).

Anywise, Toshiba support sent me two versions of the firmware, the BM1042/BM81208 (these are put in separate files but are the same actually) and the rare thing, BP71202 :). I flashed my drive with the last (this time I didn't risk and used that hardware flash memory programmer I've built long ago) and everything is fine now. I returned to the starting position, CDDA-over-SCSI have some glitches again, but they are minor to the previous problem.

BP71202 firmware might be found on http://SIGBUS.nove.bg/pool/XM/. I've put the files they sent me from Toshiba there...

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LAMMEN GORTHAUR