For those of you with VIA cards, we recommend trying dosflash32 without the VIA

windows driver
installed. The port is directly accessed with giveio.sys, and it seems that the
VIA drivers can
mess things up.
Success stories so far...
onboard VIA8237 (win32 and dos16)
ICH5 w/ VIA 6421 (dos16)
ICH7 w/ VIA 6421 (dos16)
Nforce4 - Nforce6 (both dos and win32?)
Got a different chipset and had luck? PM me or respond here!
I successfully dumped my benq with ICH7 and VIA6421L by doing the following:
Boot into bios, disable sata controller.
restart with benq turned on
run dosflash manual command
Press Y at mtk question, and hit enter
Turn off benq, turn back on benq.
And it should automatically dump!
If you have a VIA card, and need to run dosflash with manual commands, and you M
UST erase before
running the flash command (or it will likely hang on the write process) here is
how you find your
VIA cards port #:
1st way: The easier way is to open up iprep, check custom Serial ATA box, click
list SCSI based
controllers, select your VIA card, and look at the first 4 letters/numbers of th
e Dev IO. That is
your port.
2nd way:
Start, Run, msinfo32. Select Components, Storage, SCSI, then look for your VIA c
ard. Should look
like this:
Name VIA RAID Controller - 3249
Manufacturer VIA Technologies, Inc.
Status OK
PNP Device ID PCI\VEN_1106&DEV_3249&SUBSYS_32491106&REV_50\4&1AF1648C&0&08F0
I/O Port 0x0000CF00-0x0000CF0F
It is the last for digits/letters of the first I/O address range for your VIA ca
rd(in this
example, the port is CF00). You can also reach this by going to your device mana
ger, selecting
your VIA card under scsi/raid controllers, and clicking properties, then resourc
es tab. It is the
first 4 digits/letters displayed on the first I/O range setting.
If the motherboard is a NFORCE chipset with native sata (e.g. nf3 or higher, don
t think nf2 had
sata?) then this software read/write will work in dos, and *possibly* windows. I
f you have a
ICH (or other non nforce/ICH chipsets/motherboards) and a 6421 VIA, you should b
e able to dump
in dos by disabling your sata controller and trying the described method in the
readme).
Do not post links or pictures of the VIA 6421* series asking "will this work", b
ecause the answer
is half a inch above this line. Those posts WILL be deleted.
Nvidia (nforce) sata controllers seem to be able to use auto mode of dosflash16,
which will
automatically erase before writing (no manual erase neccesary)