Is my ASUS BW-12B1ST dead... like... forever?

[zimberto]

I have an ASUS BW-12B1ST from 2014 with MediaTek chip 1959...blah that I recently subjected to all sorts of torture trying to get it to read UHDs. Sadly (and not surprisingly) it now will not read any discs. It is however still flashable with specific flasher and firmware (but still doesn't work) so I'm hoping it can be recovered. It's currently got WH14NS40 v1.02 firmware, which was the last of many I tried. I did not make a copy of the original firmware but I have a copy from someone else's drive of the same model (from the RedFox forums) but it gives a checksum error if I try to flash it. I'm thinking if I can force it to eat this firmware it might be OK, but I don't know if that's possible. I'd welcome any advice before making the funeral arrangement for this faithful and ill-treated drive.

[Billycar11]

you dont have mt1959 if you drive is 2014 you have mt1939 it now says 59 but that because you flashed it wrong.
your only chance to fix it is if your pc supports dos flash see the useful for recovery stuff here: viewtopic.php?f=16&t=19634

[zimberto]

Hi Billy. I opened the drive and it's definitely 1959 and says manufactured in early 2014 (see pics). This was a warranty replacement from Asus so maybe they swapped a new control board into an older drive?

Also, my PC is a desktop version with Windows 10 x64.

Chip.jpg (15.47 KiB) Viewed 10876 times

label.jpg (32.01 KiB) Viewed 10876 times

[Billycar11]

Don't know what Asus does with warranty drives so who knows

[zimberto]

So I tried running DosFlash32 (multiple times) from a bootable USB with Windows 10 PE x86 and it shows "no ATAPI device present". I set the SATA mode to IDE in the PC BIOS so I don't think it's related to that. Interestingly, when I run DosFlash32 I see that the drive becomes disabled in Device Manager and when I exit DosFlash32 it becomes enabled again.

The only thing I seem to be able to do now is to reflash it with the currently installed WH14NS40 firmware using the LG flasher [BH16NS40(1.03-A0)-patched], but that obviously gets me nowhere. I also tried the Devilsclaw flasher and while it can display the drive ID and Name it fails on any of the read/write operations.

I think I'm almost ready to give up.

[Billycar11]

Some motherboards require the drive to be on 1 of the first four ports try all four and see if it works

[zimberto]

Some motherboards require the drive to be on 1 of the first four ports try all four and see if it works

Da man! That was it. Got it back to the original firmware and working again. Thank you!!

UPDATE: reading forums elsewhere it looks like this model was moved to the 1959 platform in 2015. Prior to that it was on the 1939 platform. It looks like I have a drive with the older mechanism but the new controller - an ASUS warranty replacement special, I guess. The other forums say that the 1959 version of this drive is UHD friendly but I have yet to find a firmware that makes mine work.

Just in case anyone finds themselves in the same position as me with this drive, it can be recovered using DosFlash32 and the attached original firmware (1.0 a).