The Max & Parris faulty PS2 Tool tread

That's very nice, but the additional shipping costs would be far too expensive. Shipping the unit to GB and back to Germany would cost 100 Euro or even more. I'm not sure if it's worth.

I would like to continue to fix it by myself. I anybody has another idea what I could try, please let me know :nod:

Anyway I will think about it. First, I need a break. The TOOL consumes too much freetime ;-)

 

good idea, I will try that.

btw, is the PS2 flash memory (which contains the firmware) replace-able? If it is so, probably it would help to replace the memory chip with a new one.

 

ok, I replaced the battery. Flashed the unit again and again, but still have only the color bars.

I checked the dsflash options

Code:

      -mpu4boot     : mpu4 boot flash search ( caution! )
      -mpu4shadow   : mpu4 shadow flash search
      -mpu4dev1     : mpu4 dev1 except b64k flash search
      -mpu4dev1b64k : mpu4 dev1 b64k flash search

what does the option mpu4boot ? Probably that could solve my problem. But I'm not sure if I should try that.

 

Hey, stop the worrying! Unclejun may have diagnosed the problem. He had a problem with one of his PS2 Tool units and swapped parts over from one to the other. He obtained the SAME issue as you!

Edited: See my next posting after UJ reply...your PS2 Tool will live again! It's just a case of establishing what is wrong. It looks slightly less likely that it is a PCB issue and more likely that the HDD / software are at fault.

UJ, take a bow :clap:

 

As a matter of fact, I only wanted to test the t14k card...

 

Let's straighten out the facts thus far

I bought unit 1 (PS2 Tool) second-hand from a private seller in England. It was faulty and I didn't expect it to ever work again, but was willing to have a go. There's loads of information in the Sony AG threads thanks to my meanderings and mutterings on this machine.

It arrived with 1 HDD, which turned out to be a false start as it was a 4Gb spare that the previous owner had presumably inserted to see whether he could install something on it.

I obtained 2 new 40Gb HDD (approx) and installed 2 fresh images supplied very kindly by an AG member.

Hence, the 1st PS2 Tool sprang to life, but because it had a faulty laser I was still without a fully functioning machine. At the time nobody had attempted to replace the laser, thus whilst I messed about with that side of things....

Unit number 2 was offered to me by MattCP as a fully functioning system, complete with working laser!

It duly arrived and I took it completely to bits, documented it (as I did the first unit) and tested components in both machines (swapping various parts) to establish whether they'd work, i.e. the DVD and HDD (for example).

When I took the DVD from the 2nd unit, placed it in the 1st I suddenly found my original unit functioned perfectly. This was when I decided to gamble. Should I insert a 3rd party laser into the unit as I couldn't obtain the exact spec originally supplied by Sony as it was a very early revision. I went ahead and it worked straight away. I swapped it out to my machine and got a good, working Sony one to put in it's place which was a later revision and found that also worked perfectly - therefore it was confirmed, you could replace with various lasers.

In the end I decided to keep the MattCP unit and sell the 1st one for no other reason than the one I had obtained from Matt was newer. I traded unit 1 in the end with Max.

The HDD from unit 1 were NOT original (remember I had bought them and created new images supplied to me by an AG member), so I thought it best to avoid any issues that might arise from me having made any mistakes and I removed those HDD, put them inside the unit I was keeping and replaced Max's units HDD with the genuine, original ones from my 2nd PS2 Tool.

I rebuilt, retested and it functioned perfectly, it ran ok and it played Oni the night before I shipped it to Germany.

Actually, I realise now that I must have also managed to establish connection to a PC as otherwise I'd not have managed to run Oni, so frankly the unit I sent to Max DID function, then stopped. How weird is this?

Skip to when Max receives the PS2 Tool, unwraps it, finds the packaging sufficiently good to have re-used said packaging for another item and then powers up to discover a problem.

To resolve the problem Max obtained the EXACT same HDD images that I have got running on the 2nd unit, put this material onto the HDD and finds... it still doesn't work! Remembering of course that these very same images originally confirmed to me that unit 1 worked! The only difference being, this information was on different HDD. That was the ONLY difference. Why did unit 1 suddenly stop responding?

Cut to UJ finding that he had accidentally replicated the issue by swapping HDD between 2 machines. What is the common issue? Seems to relate to the HDD, but how? The contents are precisely the same, they originate from the same source and unit 2 works with these images running on HDD I purchased second hand from a recycle company. Plus I swear I had both units running games prior to shipping.

Can this simply be a case of one of the HDD having failed, perhaps a bad sector, corrupt data, something as straight forward as that?

The genuine HDD Sony supplied were the ones I sent to Germany:

 

I don't think that the HDDs are the issue. Could it be the DVD drive? Has anyone ever successfully booted a PS2 TOOL without a DVD drive? Probably that color bars occur because there is something wrong with the connection between the DVD drive and the TOOL mainboard?

 

The DVD drive is basically a standard PS2 type, but with a different interface. As UJ has found he can replicate the issue by swapping a particular set of HDD from one machine to the next it does seem to point at something relating to the HDD, however... I am always open to suggestions!

We shall hopefully see shortly.

 

I hope it's the HDD, because it would be easier to replace them.

btw, I haven't replaced the IDE cable yet. I will give it a try at the weekend.

 

Just realised I outbid you on the PSx DVD on eBay. Sorry about that, I didn't think anyone else was interested. :banghead:

 

No problem ;-) Originally I thought it would be useful for the broken TOOL. What was your bid?

 

Maximum? 6.99 lol, 49p higher than your maximum OH:

If I am offered a version of PS1 development system that doesn't require or use the internal CDrom, I shall let you have it for the same price! ;-)

The DTL-H2510 is very different from the type of drive installed in the Tool. Sadly, it would be of little or no use. It's more akin to the drive found on a Sega Katana kit, in that it is slightly longer than a standard DVD drive and is a push/pull opening system. I.e. in order to open the drive you have to push the front and out pops the drive. It's also not a standard cable to the motherboard, although the power socket is standard. It also wouldn't read DVD material

 

in this case, it's useless for me. I thought it's a replacement part for the TOOL because the seller wrote something similar in the description.

 

I just came into this thread and had a look at the last page here (page8)

Anyway just to chime in with a though, if it worked before you sent it and not after then it could well be the HDD. What if it was scanned wrong during shipping or encounter some magnetic field or something else like that. Its possable the HDD was messed up while in transit.

Have you tryed another HDD? From the age of the consoles I would assume its IDE100/133 5400 RPM?

Again sorry if its been covered, just thought to say something in case it was overlooked.

 

thanks for your interest. I already tried another HDD

 

I've got some IDE cables and used it for the HDDs but unit is still not running fine.

 

I've just noticed that the samples in the manual have a dollar-sign as prefix.

Whats the difference between

$dsflash t10000-rel270.bin

and

dsflash t10000-rel270.bin

When I try to $dsflash... I get an error Permission denied

 

try:

chmod 777 $dsflash
./$dsflash t10000-rel270.bin

 

unfortunately I had no succes

Code:

chmod: too few arguments

 

$ is just the default prompt in Linux for non-root users (using Bourne shell or Bourne-Again shell (bash)). It is also used for environment variables, but not in this case....

Don't know if it will help you, but here is a post I made after fixing my TOOL which had a bad flash (thx UJ, Parris and port187!)....
http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showpost.php?p=220467&postcount=47