Flashing Pioneer drives

[Coopervid]

Hi,

most of the regular forum visitors might know me. New members might not.

LG / ASUS / Buffalo drive can be flashed by tools available free in this forum. Pioneer drives can't since the tool, even freeware, is not publicly available. For reasons I will not elaborate here.There are two members in this forum who can provide the tool. One of them is me. I don't charge for it. I only ask for a (small) donation after sending. Now this tool - BDRFlash- is Freeware but only works for pre 12/22 firmware. The other person who provides pre 12/22 firmware has an autoflasher that uses BDRFlash in the background and charges $40. Some time ago $20 what was still Ok. This person also has a monopoly solution until recently to flash post 12/22 drives and charges $200 for that service that always bothered me.

There's a new guy in town. Trevor. He invited me to test his new flasher for post 12/22 drives for free. He charges usually $29.99 per drive. So I decided to bite the bullet. I have a 212DBK drive that I flashed to S12U 1.02 for reading UHDs. The drive worked and works perfectly. My thought: I flash it to S12U 1.05 with the official flasher. It will still be supported by Mike's November 2025 update and still be Libredrive compatible and read UHDs. So if a flash goes wrong and the drive isn't bricked I will still be OK. The only risk was that Trevor's flasher might brick the drive.

I flashed to S12U 1.05 with the official Pioneer flasher and then tried Trevor's flasher. To make a long story short: It was successfully flashed back to pre 12/22 1.02 firmware!!!

The only thing I need to tell: Be patient! The flash process is rather slow and in the area of 20 - 30 min. So don't get nervous and don't do anything stupid!

Trevor's flasher is hereby recommended and a bargain compared to what was available until now.

Here's a link to his site:

https://research.trev.bot

And some more experiences with his tool:

viewtopic.php?t=42445

[zittrig]

Yes, first positive experience here too.