Dear Kos:

I'm sorry to hear this happened.  There are about 1,000 downloads of the
software each month and yours is the first e-mail to indicate a total
disaster.  Some people have Cypress based equipment that is not "RC42"
-- and they report the patch won't work, but don't report a complete
failure such as the one you refer to.

Although I don't have much knowledge, I believe there is a jumper
setting to reset the eprom.  See the section where I discuss "Western
Digital Drive," and Jon indicated he had to jump pins 1 & 3 on the 40
pin connector.  I have no way of knowing, of course, whether the same
jumper would be true for your external box.

I have no idea whether this will work for you.  However, I think it is
unlikely that the software would damage the eprom, only that it would
reprogram it in some manner.

You also might try plugging the device into a linux computer, if you
know someone that has one.  I have no idea what would happen -- but
linux "plug'n'play" works somewhat differently from Windows.  My
external drive is accessible from linux as well as from Windows.

Normally, also, the device that is actually inside your external box is
still functional if you mount it inside a desktop computer or inside an
external box.  For instance, the external box I purchased was $20.00
from buy.com.

I have no idea whether any of these ideas will help you, just some
suggestions.

Thanks for writing & if you find a solution, I would be pleased to post
it on my website.


Barrington Daltrey

Kos wrote:

> Hello there, and thank you for taking the time to write an article in
> order to help users who experience problem with the Cypress chipset.
> 
> I followed the steps listed on your page, run "primer.exe", got the
> success message, turned down the computer, then the drive, rebooted
> the computer and turned on the drive only to see that it wasn't being
> recognized anymore.
> 
> I mean nothing -- not even a question mark, a "malfunctioning
> hardware" notice, nothing. I've either fried the chipset, or
> reprogrammed the EPROM to something the computer (I've tried it on two
> machines) cannot even be bothered to read.
> 
> So I would like to ask:
> 
> (a) has this happened to any of your readers?
> (b) any hints to work-around it? I don't care about getting it to work
> for the moment, I just want to get Windows to recognize there's a
> device attached? Is there a way to unprogram the EPROM?
> 
> Thanks in advance for your help,
> Kos