HD-A1 NEC Drive

[numbaonestunna]

Since the A1 is now officially obsolete with the price at walmart going down to $98USD, I figured it might be time to re-up on the efforts to get the drive to work in the computer.

I have this bin from the drive firmware and I thought I would post it here so I we could work together on this.

http://rapidshare.com/files/66867310/HDDVDHDA1.zip.html

There is the link for the NEC HR-1100A firmware bin as it came out of the drive using BinFlash.

[bcrabl]

Great job. Hope someday we can have a drive that reads KCD hooked up on the PC. Then if we could only have the keys from a stanalone....

[awhitehead]

*shrug* 2.0T firmware. Was part of the firmware updates for first gen Toshiba players in fw 2.2 and 2.3.

Basically, in order for HR-1100A to work on a computer, you need to re-implement the AACS authentication using undocumented vendor specific commands (not to mention the fact that you'll need to obtain somewhere a bunch of stand-alone device keys). This will give you a drive that you can use to rip the HD-DVDs to PC hard drive. Player that can use this drive directly, of course, is harder.

[numbaonestunna]

*shrug* 2.0T firmware. Was part of the firmware updates for first gen Toshiba players in fw 2.2 and 2.3.

Basically, in order for HR-1100A to work on a computer, you need to re-implement the AACS authentication using undocumented vendor specific commands (not to mention the fact that you'll need to obtain somewhere a bunch of stand-alone device keys). This will give you a drive that you can use to rip the HD-DVDs to PC hard drive. Player that can use this drive directly, of course, is harder.

So, can I get my hands on a different firmware to have it read HD-DVD in a PC?

That's half the battle..

[JeffAlso]

Great job. Hope someday we can have a drive that reads KCD hooked up on the PC. Then if we could only have the keys from a stanalone....
A bit off topic, but the Toshiba SD-S802A (AKA Xbox HD DVD drive) is capable of reading the KCD from the lead-in. I don't think anyone has implemented this yet though:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=979423#post979423

This drive can also be mounted internally, although its a kind of a pain in the butt to do. You have to cut the mounting legs off the chassis using a dremmel, surface mount the eject button to the front of the drive, and modify an adapter board to connect it to internal power and IDE controller:
http://www.xboxhacker.net/index.php?topic=6866.60

I've got one in my HTPC and it works great with PowerDVD, AnyDVD HD, and aacskeys up to MKBv3.

[numbaonestunna]

I have that already, Geremia had that great post and the soldering was easy as hell to do.

As for the NEC drive, it's more of an internal drive and I would like to think that this is possible in some way.

I was thinking about taking an old CD-R drive and moving the guts of the XBox HD-DVD player to it. Think I'd have any luck? The drive mechanics are about the same I'd have to do some soldering to get the drive to function on it's original board for the eject function but other than that I definitely see this as possible..

Any ideas what Cd-R player I should use to get the guts transferred?

I was thinking a Toshiba drive just because it has a somewhat angled laser track. I hate hijacking my own thread...

[JeffAlso]

I thought about moving the guts of the drive into a standard chassis as well, but eventually gave up on the idea. It was just easier to chop it down to size, and glue the eject button to the front with an industrial adhesive. Not the prettiest thing ever, but it's internal now and hasn't bothered me in the slightest :)

Not everyone is going to want to do this though, so finding an internal drive that can function the same (reading VID and KCD) without the hardware mods would be a big win for the community.

[Murleen]

I don't know about any other countries, but here in the UK the SD-H802A (PC version of xbox drive) is getting pretty cheap - down to about £62. Much easier than hacking the xbox one like I did :)

[evdberg]

Just a question: I did read that the Xbox drive does support KCD. Does this mean I can use the drive as replacement unit in my HD-A1? The unit gets more and more problems reading disks ...

[numbaonestunna]

No, the service manual for the A1 says that you must call Toshiba for a new key to marry the NEC drive to the rest of the unit.

[awhitehead]

Just a question: I did read that the Xbox drive does support KCD. Does this mean I can use the drive as replacement unit in my HD-A1? The unit gets more and more problems reading disks ...

Isn't implementation of reading KCD secret, and vendor specific?

In other words, were the drive in Xbox 360 add-on made by NEC instead of Toshiba, you might have had a chance, since CDBs would likely be the same.

(This is ignoring the part about the NEC drive serial number being used as an encryption key for the HD-A1 firmware - see the thread in stand-alone players forum on the procedure to re-marry the firmware and a drive by using multiple flashings, etc)

Considering your situation, HD-A2s are 98 USD at Wallmarts, so that looks like a reasonable replacement

[evdberg]

Considering your situation, HD-A2s are 98 USD at Wallmarts, so that looks like a reasonable replacement

Definitely ... only problem is I am not located in the U.S. ... and shipping of my A1 was already more than the current price of the A2 ...

[numbaonestunna]

I would hope that somebody still wants to figure this drive out from the A1.. I can't believe that it's not possible.

[awhitehead]

I would hope that somebody still wants to figure this drive out from the A1.. I can't believe that it's not possible.

When you say "wants to figure out this drive", what exactly do you mean?

[numbaonestunna]

Well, what would it require to get this drive running in a PC.

[awhitehead]

I see.

In my (unexpert, uneducated) opinion, you will need one of the two things:

Either a custom IDE driver, that, when it detects this particular drive during the inquiry command on bootup, realizes that it has to send different CDBs then the spec in order to read HD-DVDs (I seem to recall that it reads CDs and normal DVDs perfectly fine in a PC). You will need to figure out what CDBs to send (since they are vendor specific and undocumented) and potentially obtain some stand-alone device keys in order to do the authentication. This will work on a specific OS that it's written for.

Another alternative is to change firmware, first by reverse engineering it again to figure out vendor specific commands for HD-DVD authentication, and then to attempt to edit it to implement PC style authentication. That would work with any OS.

Lastly, if these drives were actually sold as stand-alone PC drives, you can "just" see about obtaining firmware from a stand-alone drive, and flash it in. I believe that Liggy/Dee can add support for flashing HR-1100A to binflash if the support is not there already (I was under impression that binflash is readonly for this drive at the moment)

Basically the hard part are the vendor specific CDBs for stand-alone AACS authentication. It's pretty trivial to whip up an app based on plscsi (if you want portability) or scg (if you just want Linux) that will talk to the drive.