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Maximus vampire - REVIEW
March 19th, 2010
The Vampire - Review
What do you get for your money?
(NOT INCLUDED) 360Xtractor/drive cable (essential)
Vampire Contents
- The Vampire
- Power Cable for vampire
- 2 x Rebuild Boards
- Foam Sheet
So my Vampire arrived in a jiffy bag with the cable, foam matting and two rebuild boards (why 2? – I looked it up! They are there to repair previous MRA hack attempts and to provide a point to probe on!). Okay – so I dig out a drive i used for a great deal of testing. Let’s Proceed!
Here is what happened:
I find myself the 1 page tutorial from Maximus official website, which leads you on to read the installation tutorial HERE - I ignore the cutting traces part as i already have previously MRA hacked this drive – and it’s a “rebuild” board right? So i’ll use it to repair my traces – my cleaning of the board was done using a fibreglass pen so my traces look similar to this:
I place on my rebuild board and solder into place! Cleaning off the additional points i required to solder this into place.
Sadly – my 360Xtractor refuses to power on – I must have a short somewhere. I double check my soldering and it’s clean, so I de-solder the “rebuild” board. Take a closer look at how it’s built!
Here is my problem – the width of the connections underneath the board is too wide! It is shorting out onto my other traces that are uncovered!
– So as a “Rebuild” of any previous attempts (using fibreglass pen to clean the traces)it is NO GOOD!
So not to be put off – I try Using the Vampire Without the rebuild board!
I jump the traces either side of the pad 101 with a small wire as shown in their tutorial for Vampire only. I follow the tutorial to the letter!
Still no good! – I cannot get vendor mode to show no matter what i try.
Has my soldering killed the drive? Did i lift a trace/pad? Well no! I revert to standard MRA Hack and it works!
So i try again from scratch on another drive!(Virgin-untouched!)
Clean ONLY the points on PCB i want solder on!
Solder on rebuild board – This time it Works! \o/ as there were no traces cleaned off other than the spots i wanted solder on!
Follow Tutorial – Drive dumped! No problems 0x72 status and good chip properties!. Read the firmware – solder the jumper, spoof and flash!
SUCCESS!
In the name of a full and thorough test, I remove the Rebuild board! Apply the required jumper and test it without the rebuild board.
Another Success! – simple enough to do essentially only a few cuts, probe it, dump it, and re-solder and flash it! – Fairly easy!
So back to my original problem! The first drive I couldn’t dump! Well after a lot of head scratching and tests on a further 2 drives, I found only 1 difference:
The troublesome drive has a Winbond IC as opposed to the others that had MXIC.
No matter what I tried – The Vampire could not get this drive into Vendor mode.
Only having 1 winbond IC drive to test with I am unable to confirm if this is the same on ALL winbond drives! BUT CAN confirm it works well with MXIC chipset drives.
CONCLUSIONS
POSITIVES |
NEGATIVES
|
A cheap solution for those that already own a 360Xtractor
|
You NEED a 360Xtractor – no other kit will work.
|
Overall a Nice product – seems to work well to get your full firmware dumps from the 83850C v2 and 93450C drives.
For those with 360xtractor and spear – a sensible choice to enable the complete range of LiteOn drives to be dumped and flashed.
For those with limited soldering experience i would recommend if using the Vampire, use the tutorial without rebuild board and purchase some conductive pens/glue to repair cuts after dump – as soldering on the rebuild board is a little fiddly.
For modders – they should be able to dump/repair drives in very little time at all.
An affordable – Usable product, For those who already own a 360Xtractor
– it’s a no-brainer!