Repairing a Ocz revodrive 3 x2 SSD [SOLVED] - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / repair

author: Mut1
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: September 02, 2020, 03:51:58 pm
content: Hi Everybody, new in the forum and not a native speaker of English, but lets try.Last weekend I was trying to repair a old Ocz revodrive 3 x2 240GB Pcie.This card is composed of a marvell 88se9485 sas conrtoller connected to 4 sandforce controllers, each sandforce controller is connected to a bank of flash memories.At the bios and at Windows the card shows itself like a scsi controller connected to a 240GB disk and at linux shows itself as 4 disks of 60GB.At the beginning the SSD was correctly detected by windows, but one of the four sandforce controllers, connected to the marvell 88se9485, was not showing up.Without ideas, I downloaded the ocz tools (now toshiba) and upgraded the firmware of the marvell and the of the sandforce controllers.At the end I have discovered that the problem was only a tiny little coil that was broken, after the replacement of the coil, all 4 sandforce controllers are getting detected correctly.But looks like the firmware upgrade of the marvell 88se9485 without one of the sandforce controller have screwed up the card config, now the card is not getting detected by windows.Well, I m looking for a full dump of the firmware of the marvell 88se9485. It is a 25p40vp SPI flash marked as U1 on the board to try resurrect this board.Thanks in advance

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 02, 2020, 04:07:18 pm
content: You did not say if you updated the firmware again or not after fixing the fault. If you did not, one of sandforce controllers likely runs on old firmware.

author: Mut1
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: September 02, 2020, 05:03:49 pm
content: After the fix, I have executed again the flash tool on linux and updated all the sandforce controllers to the lastest firmware.But now the flash tool only see the sandforces controllers and dont detect the marvell.At windows the drive stays with a exclamation and at linux the oficial ocz driver says that is something wrong with the card config.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 02, 2020, 05:37:38 pm
content: http://vlab.su/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=51492I've found the firmware dump. The issue is you need either 15 posts (which I don't have) on that Russian forum to be allowed to download. Or buy paid access for RUB 800 = $ 10.50.

author: fzabkar
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 02, 2020, 05:50:10 pm
content: Quote from: wraper on September 02, 2020, 05:37:38 pmScam.

author: Mut1
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: September 02, 2020, 06:07:23 pm
content: I have saw this Russian post, but is not the exact same model.The russian is revodrive 3 , and mine is a revodrive 3 x2, probably a pretty similar hardware and same firmware, but I will not take the risk.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 02, 2020, 06:07:38 pm
content: Quote from: fzabkar on September 02, 2020, 05:50:10 pmVery nice to write nonsense without even checking the subject. Nope it's a very real and big repair forum with tons of service manuals and firmware dumps. Mostly focused on graphics cards and motherboards. But they have a minimum post amount to enable downloads which can be bypassed if you want to pay. Compared do them repair section on eevblog does not exist.

author: fzabkar
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 02, 2020, 08:05:16 pm
content: I resent the idea of paying for stuff that users have supplied for free, just as I would hate the owner of this forum to sell any firmware dumps of my own. That's the scam I'm referring to.

author: Rasz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 02, 2020, 08:16:42 pm
content: Quote from: fzabkar on September 02, 2020, 08:05:16 pmyou can "pay" by posting on their forum and helping people

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 02, 2020, 08:35:08 pm
content: Quote from: fzabkar on September 02, 2020, 08:05:16 pmIt's made so that random people passing buy cannot simply download everything. And it also helps against copyright owners. They have a lot of info which you cannot find anywhere else, especially for free. I almost had not posted there since lately I do more design/production rather than repair. And on several occasions when I needed stuff available there, I either finally found it elsewhere, downloaded via external link available there or simply managed without it. Every time regretting I did not have those damn 15 posts, as minimum it would save me quite a lot of time. And I also don't like paying for free stuff, so I didn't.

author: fzabkar
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 02, 2020, 08:54:15 pm
content: Quote from: Mut1 on September 02, 2020, 06:07:23 pmCan you provide us with your own firmware dump and a link to the firmware update? FWIW, I have made some general observations on "pepe's" firmware dump at HDD Guru.BTW, the files area at HDD Guru has tons of firmware resources, all available for free, no subscription required.I should add that the contents of the SPI flash memory are unique insofar as they include the 512-byte Identify Device data blocks for each SSD.

author: Mut1
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: September 02, 2020, 11:51:01 pm
content: Hi fzabkar, I will read your post on the hddguru. Attached is my dump.During the first update the first thing I thought was, this tool will not permit to save a backup of my old firmware? Its strange!The firmware is not available for download, only the flasher that downloads the fimware during the update, Toshiba uses some tricks in their flasher to prevent the download of the raw firmware, exactly like sad here:https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/ocz-vertex-2-ssd-firmware/The command line updater can be found here:https://ssd.toshiba-memory.com/en-amer/download/clout.

author: fzabkar
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 03, 2020, 12:12:29 am
content: FWIW, your firmware dump doesn't have any Identify Device blocks for any of the 4 SSDs. I don't know if that is significant. Perhaps these parameters need to be reset after the update?Is there any way of reconfiguring the RAID? What if you were to reconfigure the RAID 0 as a RAID 1? Are there any vendor tools that would enable that?

author: Mut1
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: September 03, 2020, 10:55:27 am
content: Quote from: fzabkar on September 03, 2020, 12:12:29 amI thing that during the flashing process or during the first boot after flash the metadata of the SSDs are collected to "automagically" rebuild the raid.The controller does not not have any utility built in or tool available by the vendor to reconfigure the array.

author: Mut1
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: September 03, 2020, 01:21:48 pm
content: The revodrive is working again!The user pepe from hddguru forum sent me a dump of his revodrive 3 120GBMy theory was that even if the firmware from pepe has information from a wrong array and was not exectly the same card, maybe its is "sufficiently good" to make the card get detected and enable the flasher to update the bios.To make things worse in each operating system the flasher reacts different- linux using generic mvsas driver: only the sandforce controllers was getting detected- linux using the old oczpcie driver: the flasher didnt detected the card and kernel was still throwing errors relative to card config- windows 10: ocz scsi driver detected and flasher enabling the option to update the bios, bingo!After flashing the bios, I rebooted the system and the array was correctly detected as a raid 0 of 240GB (4x 60GB).Thanks fzabkar and everyvody that helped!

author: fzabkar
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 03, 2020, 06:01:10 pm
content: It would be interesting to see what your "BIOS" contains now ...

author: Mut1
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: September 03, 2020, 09:21:52 pm
content: I probably will dump this chip again.My capabilities for reading and writing eprom chips are at maximum "precarious". I m still using a (very) old willem LPT eprom programmer without any adapter.So each reading writing cycle is a tedious soldering job .

author: fzabkar
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 03, 2020, 10:47:12 pm
content: Best not to risk it then ...

author: ARZE
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: June 11, 2021, 07:08:52 pm
content: Hi allPlease, I have a Revodrive 3 X2 240GB that are giving me error: Bios Checksum or Drive Status , and only regognize as 60GB, can someone help me?Thanks very much

author: Rompix
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: August 11, 2021, 11:22:32 am
content: HiI have same problem with myRevodrive 3 X2 480GBit worked fine for 5 yearnow showing 4 x 120GB in ubuntu. Windows N/A Boot N/Aanyone have same problem?