LG WH14NS40 SC:NS50

[dalosliandi]

Hey folks, I'd like to thank everyone who put together the downgrade instructions for the WH16NS40. I was able to use those instructions to downgrade my LG WH14NS40 drive. It's currently ripping my first UHD. I bought it open box from newegg for around $40. It arrived as a Rom Ver. 1.03 manufactured in January 2018 with service code NS50.



In the spirit of sharing I thought I'd create an account here and share my experience.

The method I used to downgrade it to 1.02 was this:

1. make a bootable DOS flash drive with Rufus 3.3 on my Windows 10 PC
2. copy the dosflash.exe and the dosflash.typ data file to the flash drive.
3. on the old machine where the WH14NS40 is installed boot from the flash drive
4. run Dosflash at the prompt. Try again if it tells you no ATAPI devices were detected.
5. When prompted choose R for read and save the file to something like 'backup.bin'
6. shut down the flashing PC when this is done and then put the flash drive back in the Windows PC
7. make a copy of 'backup.bin' for safe-keeping. Now make another copy somewhere else.
8. Run the EEPROM_Data_Mover.exe and follow the directions. You'll need your backup.bin file and the "clean firmware file" (I used WH14NS40 ver 1.02)
   Out of step 8 comes a new modified firmware file I called 'modded.bin' It helps to keep the names short in DOS because you end up having to type them in.
9. copy 'modded.bin' to the flash drive and take it back over to the flashing PC
10. boot from the flash drive and run dosflash again this time in W mode. Specify the file name modded.bin or whatever you called the file created in step 8

If this goes well you should see about 32 lines of "OK!" appear on the screen. The hard part for me was finding a sufficiently old enough PC that would let me use ATA mode on the SATA bus. For some reason it didn't want to work when it was Secondary slave. It had to be master. (Worked on SATA1 but not SATA2)

Floating around is a dosflash package which contains a dosflash.typ that is missing this line:

Code: Select all

0x24  0x24  0x200 0x20  0xC7  "MediaTek MT1959"

Make sure whatever dosflash.exe you are using that it has a dosflash.typ containing that line. My CRC32 hashes for the files used are as follows:

dosflash.exe - EDC26008
dosflash.typ - 53B2DB76
EEPROM_Data_Mover.exe - 2A37A03C
flash_HL-DT-ST_BD-RE_WH14NS40_1.02_NS50.bin (AKA clean firmware) - 509D06F0

Also I should mention in case it's significant that I did the flashing on a 10+ year old foxconn N15235 motherboard which uses AWARD BIOS. The SATA setting that worked was called "compatible," which I believe meant "IDE compatible." I have seen other terminology for this in various BIOS such as "ATAPI", "ATA", "PATA", "EIDE", "Legacy" and I'm sure there are others. Just thought I should mention that because a lot of the how to's are specifically saying "IDE" mode which I have never seen in any BIOS referred to by that name. Most commonly I have seen "ATA."

Also in the process of trying to get Dosflash to work on a new machine (MSI B350M), I hosed an SSD by switching SATA to RAID mode then deleting the array. I figured it wouldn't hurt my data because I never configured an array. The PC was booting in AHCI mode prior to that. Sometimes RAID/ATA are listed together so that's why I thought I would try that. Fortunately this was a really new build and didn't have anything important on it yet. Guess who's installing Windows 10 again tomorrow? Me.

I've made a "downgrade bundle" for this drive containing just the four required files for the WH14NS40 NS50.

[dalosliandi]

I'd like to add that I am using the WH14NS40 drive externally with a Vantec USB 3.0 Dock, Model CB-ST00U3 and it works great. My average rip speed so far with it is 2.4x which I hope will improve by keeping the drive cool. It does seem to get pretty warm otherwise. Here's a photo.

WH14NS40-NS50-Vantec-CB-ST00U3.jpeg (317.27 KiB) Viewed 10790 times

[Kehar31]

Thank you for this! Will give it a shot if I can find a compatible computer with SATA ATA

[Kehar31]

Aaannnnd u am up and running, thanks for the instructions!