Some Days You Eat The Checksum, And Some Days The Checksum Eats You., hddhackr for old PC Options

[lanlguy]

I'm trying to use hddhackr to flash a new WD 250 gb sata drive for my xbox. Hddhackr is on a usb stick and bootable. I have an old pc, Asus A7V8X-X, AMD processor, all built in 2003. There is no specific SATA support on the mobo/user manual, no sata connectors, etc. Booting to XP, the pc can see the WD (connected by a cute little usb converter box) and I could apparently format it and use it as a backup or whatever, but hddhackr, used in automatic mode, cannot find it; it just sees the native IDE stuff. I figure the WD needed to be connected more directly to the bus, so I bought a PCI sata card (with drivers). But again hddhackr said "No ATA devices found!"

I found some discussion on the web concerning "manual mode" for hddhackr that used part of the hexadecimal address of the IDE port to find drives should the auto mode not work. Plus, the sata card software (seen during system boot) indicated the WD was located on channel 2 (the secondary IDE channel). My secondary IDE address ends in 0170, thus "hddhackr [d, c, f, r] 0170 A0" (A0 is shorthand for the sata drive itself).

Here is what I entered at the prompt: hddhackr c 0170 a0

Using the "c" argument (c = create partitions), hddhackr worked fine, creating partitions 0/2/3 perfectly. However, the "f" argument (f = flash the WD hardware) does not work. Here is the line I entered: hddhackr f 0170 a0 hddss.bin undo.bin

So this is where I get eaten by the checksum error message: "Checksum (0778) in HDDSS.BIN is wrong!" And that is where the story ends so

far. Any clues out there? PS: If I boot with the usb stick alone (i.e., system drive disconnected) hddhackr, even in manual mode, cannot find any sata devices. I have redownloaded/extracted the hack files just in case of corruption; no improvement. The sata card is not a recent product; the company (Promise) is out of business and there are no updated drivers out there.

This is too much for ol' Duder's head. C'mon you teenage hackers, solve this for me, help an old man!

[Xombe]

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