Bricked ecu members(need your help)...........clone from 99vr4(Brett)

Just giving props where props are due. He hooked me up with a clone ecu after I bricked my ecu his work is top notch. This clone smells and looks brand new, well that's because it is brand new.

I successfully flashed my car with v2, I used a car battery jump pack it was putting out 15 volts when I tested it with my voltmeter. My battery is a Wal-Mart brand (not sure which one) that has 700 cca and got it 8/12. Brett is trying to collect info on bricked ecu set-ups so we can eliminate this problem. So if you have bricked your ecu please post up your battery age, cca, brand, and if you used a jump pack or battery charger. Also if you jump pack was fully charged (it should be for flashing)

Oh and if you have bricked your ecu and need it fixed or need a new clone please Pm 99v4r (Brett). I do not work for him or anything like that, I just appreciate good people. :Clap:

Glad you got it fixed. How is she running?

I just let it idle, but its idling way better than it was on the one beat up ecu I had. AFR are the same about 14.5 to 14.4 that needs to be fine tuned a little. So far so good. Ill play with it more this weekend when the wife and baby are sleeping.

You're not going to be able to fine tune idle. Might as well disregard the wideband entirely until you're in open loop.

Very glad to hear you're happy with the ECU repair!

Thank you for the props! The battery information is great! After testing you the other day, I am not sure if perhaps you had a bad xml that caused the brick. Hmmmm... could you maybe send me the "original" download package that you used so that I can check the CRC on it?

Brett fail... :p

If the XML is "bad" ECUFlash won't even open it. The only way you can brick an ECU with a ROM is by trying to flash chrome onto an FA processor (or some other chip with a different memory model)

I deleted the one that didn't open so I didn't get mixed up between the good and bad. It opened and started to flash just fine. It stopped at like 45% and gave me the error. I sent Brett the ecu received my clone back, put it in the car and tried to read from the ecu and it wouldn't read. So I went back in the house and tried to open the bin. and it wouldn't open. I played with ecuflash 1.44 then 1.42 and neither worked. I even thought it was my laptop so I tried my wives computer and still didn't work. So I found a evo bin(http://www.evoscan.com/roms/mitsubishi/) and it opened just fine. So the only thing it could have been was the xml.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by fridayda13th

I deleted the one that didn't open so I didn't get mixed up between the good and bad. It opened and started to flash just fine. It stopped at like 45% and gave me the error.

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That's because it lost voltage during the flash. Nothing to do with the ROM.

Greg, I think he could have had a corrupted file...a bad character some where in the bin would cause this.

This of why I posted the CRC/MD5 hash values for the other bin files.

I download tons of files from the internet and every now and then I'll get a corrupted download. it happens. it will have the right file size but 1 character somewhere in the middle be screwed up in the exe or zip won't run.

and I already know if you open up the bin file and change some characters in hex editor and save it it will still open n ecu flash, yet when you flash it can f*** it up

so it is quite possible he had an issue with his laptop that corrupted the file and caused the ecu to brick... this is why I asked for a copy of it to verify the hash value.

PC manufactures used to make sure you verify the hash every single time you try to update the BIOS on your PC for this very same reason.

it's nothing you did it just happens that way from time to time I think. the only way to know for sure is to verify the XML and bin, which of course he does not have any more

Just saying.

Please don't start spreading these rediculous ideas.

Flashing a different stock ROM to an ECU (read off a stock VR4 ECU and saved onto the hard drive) can cause a bricked ECU. Even trying to write the stock 99 VR4 006 ROM onto an earlier VR4 ECU with the 004 file on it can cause a brick. Its happened to me many times before I even got into ROM mods. I highly highly doubt somehow this ROM could become corrupt reading, saving to the HD and writing to another ECU. I don't even have a SSD HD on my laptop.

Luckily I had success in unbricking these ECUs (all of these are true 98/99 boards before the idea of cloning was first discussed) by re-writing the original ROM back onto them.

Bricks are caused from the battery losing a charge during a long flash. This isn't some idea I pulled out of the air.... I observe the battery drain on the volt meter gauge in my SL during a long flash. Scary to watch. I've even attached a real multimeter to observe the drain right off the battery itself during a flash. The voltage can drop as low as 10volts during a long flash! Try it for yourself.

In fact I'll even go so far as to do a byte by byte comparison to this so called "bad rom" next to an original and show you the file does not become corrupted in anyway from being zipped. I wrote an excell file to do such a thing years ago now to find all the differences between the 3 known 99 ROMs I've found.