Sometime in 2018/07 I purchased a bluray drive WH16NS40 svc code: NS50 from Amazon which arrived with firmware 1.03 pre-installed. At the time of my research I believed (not sure if I was right or not) that I needed to have 1.02 for makemkv to be able to use this drive for reading my media. As someone who chooses the less easy paths, I run only Linux and so my search for a way to flash the drive only returned windows boot media. After researching what happens to create the firmware prior to uploading, I came up with this bash script which uses dd to create my own firmware modifier (the comments are from whatever literature I used):
Code: Select all
#!/bin/bash
#On the backup firmware (the dumped one) select hex range starting from 0x1E8000 offset to 0x1E84FF and copy it in the same range of the new firmware. (**)
#Do the same as point 3. but starting now from 0x1E9000 to the end of the file. (***)
#Save the new firmware (for example as TEST.BIN).
#You are now ready for flashing (or crossflashing) the new firmware (or a downgrade version).
BACKUP=$1
CLEAN=$2
BLOCK=256
SIG_CNT=$((0x500/$BLOCK))
SIG_POS=$((0x1E8000/$BLOCK))
CAL_POS=$((0x1E9000/$BLOCK))
DD=`which dd`
NEW_FW="new_fw.bin"
CMD="$DD status=progress conv=notrunc if=$BACKUP of=$NEW_FW bs=$BLOCK"
for i in $BACKUP $CLEAN; do
if [ ! -f $i ]; then
echo file $i Does not exist.
exit
fi
done
echo "Creating new file."
cp $CLEAN $NEW_FW
echo "Copying signature."
$CMD count=$SIG_CNT seek=$SIG_POS skip=$SIG_POS
echo "Copying calibration."
$CMD seek=$CAL_POS skip=$CAL_POS
echo "Done."
My drive was successfully downgraded to 1.02 and I've had success reading my discs with makemkv.
I thought I'd post this but please note that my testing is a single drive on a single run quite a while back so if you want try this, you do so at your own risk and your drive may become a brick.
