XFlash Utility for LiteOn/Sony Optical Drives
The Official Thread

What does this do?
This tool is designed to extract the raw .BIN firmwares from LiteOn's firmware flashers (the ones that use XFlash). These .BIN files can then be used with firmware flashing tools such as MtkFlash.

Compatibility
This program only works with XFlash firmware flashers. XFlash Utility will not work with scrambled/compressed flashers!

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Latest version is 3.2.4 (7 January 2008)
Download: http://codeguys.rpc1.org/utilities.html
More Info: Change Log | Documentation | Unpacking RAR Files

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Enjoy!

Cool!

You can recognize which Windows updaters are considered XFlash by looking at the main Window. There are two variations as seen below.

XFlash 1:


XFlash 2:


The older Liteon Windows Flasher that you might still find for some drives that this tool will not work with can be seen below:

This tool will be very handy...

A BIG thank you

Keep up the good work.

Nice!
Two tools in one week!

Keep up the good work!

Another Liteon GURU!

Good job Code65536

Thanks!

Very useful indeed.

Sorry ... I think this tool won't work very soon...
I compressed/scrambled the binary data.
Sorry again !!

...please clarify...

I think Karr is telling us that upcoming firmware upgrade releases will be in a compressed/scrambled format. Probably to save Liteon some bandwidth.

(Unmodified) Xflash-X won't be able to find the bytes it's looking for.

Thanks for the warning Karr

*nods*

You've got to do what you've got to do... no worries

Any change there will be someone to write an unpacker/descrambler for stock firmwares that come straight from LiteOn?

Possible workaround:
If you have the drive that the f/w update was really intended for, flash it with the new firmware from LiteOn. Use any flash utility to dump the firmware from the drive to a .bin file. And there you have the unscrambled, uncompressed firmware file. Disadvantage of this method is that you have to have the right drive, a cross-flashed drive won't work.

@squirrel

just look at the codeguys, tdbs and dhc014's site, there are a lot of unscrambled firmwares.

It will work enough to extract the firmware. Simply ignore the flashing led, crossflash the extracted firmware and flash it. But as allready posted, there are several places where you can get unscrambled firmwares

I know that, but I didn't mean that. Sometimes LiteOn releases a new firmware and you won't find it unscrambled in a few days time. And sometimes there are those firmwares that shouldn't have been released but somehow escaped from LiteOn headquarters... For this cases, it would be nice if Xflash-X could handle scrambled/packed firmwares, just to mention something...

This question has been addressed before, in another thread.

As some on this forum may remember, a long time ago, XFlash-X used to handle scrambled firmwares. But LiteOn kept adapting its scrambling algorithm. It got to the point where a new version of XFlash-X became obsolete in just a few days because it doesn't take that much effort for LiteOn to make minor (or not so minor) changes to the scrambling algorithm. Because XFlash-X was becoming obsolete so quickly and so frequently, having the unscrambling feature was, in practice, useless. Thanks to XFlash-X, LiteOn has already created, by my count, 5 different scrambling algorithms. This number would probably be much higher if I had kept updating XFlash-X.

So, no, there will probably never be a unscrambler for LiteOn firmwares.

@code65536

how do you, and other firmware freaks, extract the firmware and whats the tool to create an .exe-file with the unscrambled fw with?

Excuse me for the empty reply above. I had text typed, but somehow something went wrong when I pressed the send button. The text vanished and I can't edit the post anymore.

What I wrote was that I was wondering why LiteOn should take the hassle to scramble their new f/w, because it is easy enough to flash it, dump it and save the .bin file unscrambled.

Another wonder I had was about the added value of XFlash-X, because when someone has to descramble the .exe first, it's also easy to save the unscrambled .bin and flash that with any flasher available.

Understand me well, I hugely appreciate the work of the C0deguys!

1/ I don't know why they bother, either. But they do.

2/ XFlash-X used to have value, but now that most flashers of interest are scrambled, there is very little value to this tool. Which is why this thread has been lying dormant for so long until someone dug it up from the grave.

just a thought... how hard would it be to do a software-emulated LiteOn drive? That way it could be "flashed" and extract the bin that way. I know, it's a crazy suggestion, but this thread had me thinking.......

-Blu

I suppose that you would need to have something that contained an eeprom that looked like a Liteon Drive, sorta like Daemon Tool's, or Alcohol 120%'s virtual drive, except that it would need to have a unique LiteOn id... thus, it would probably be possible, but impractical.

Besides, most firmware's that come out need to be tweaked, so it's just best to wait for the 'masters' to work out the bugs first.

Codeguys are a bunch of firmware masters. They KNOW firmware, and they KNOW how to make it work better. Trust them... believe me, it's worth it to do so.

*shakes head* There is no need to make suggestions on solving a problem that does not need solving. We have our ways of getting a firmware out of the flasher, and for a number of reasons, making such methods public would provide the community with little or no benefit (for one, because unscrambled firmwares are already readily accessible).

...and making the methods public would make them unusable, because LiteOn or whatever company will change the scrambling procedures again...

So are we really saying, that Liteon put effort into chasing down the descrambling of the firmware, but not into fixing the dodgy burn quality that's one reason for people wanting to get into the firmware in the first place?