Flashing TS-H943 ms28 firmware on ATI SB600

I have successfully flashed an XBOX 360 Samsung drive (TS-H943, MS28) on a GA-MA69G-S3H using the on-board ATI SB600 SATA2 controller.

I did this using JungleFlasher and iXtreme 1.6 with the half-open drive door trick.

At the beginning I have tried most of the DOS flash disk methods with iPrep and XtremeBootMaker but with no success. In all cases the drive was found and recognized, but i got stuck at the 0x51 status and couldn’t get it to start reading. (the power off/on trick, nor the doors open trick) I went for the DOS boot methods because i had linux on my computer, and had no access to XP, but just when I was about to give up and buy a VIA SATA card i thought I’d give it a try with XP and see what happens.

I can safely say that I am glad I did so.. Here is how the flashing went:

1. I set the BIOS Sata settings to NativeIDE.
2. I have powered the Samsung drive with the XBOX and plugged the Sata cable into SATA0 on the motherboard (and placed the Xbox on top of the PC so the grounds are common)
3. I went into xp and installed the driver and restarted. (Made sure the xbox drive is recognized in BIOS)
4. I’ve popped out my DVD door and held it down with my hand so it wouldn’t close. (after a while the drive gave up on trying to close it)
5. I’ve uploaded firmware iXtreme 1.6 to the firmware folder of jungle flasher
6. I’ve started up JungleFlasher and went for SammyUnlock
7. It recognized the drive, and after 2 attempts of closing / opening the bay door i got a status read
8. Then i dumped the old firmware and saved it to 2 different locations (made sure I’d have it secured for future, I might want to reset to the original fw)
9. I followed the onscreen instructions and got to the part where i should have saved the firmware. At this point I noticed that the two keys did not match, one was full of zeros, so i aborted and did the whole reading all over again. (THE 2 KEYS MUST MATCH)
10. I saved the hacked firmware, and went back to the DVD screen and wrote(flashed) it to the drive.

At the end i got the “Writing ok” message and everything was nice and cool from there. I’m just writing this down so people would know that you can flash an ms28 drive using SB600. In the documentations I only found references that said that supposedly only VIA cards work.


My 2 cents