[Dead] Please help me! I need firmware advice

[Guest]

Good evening,

Please let me start by saying I'm a PC tech, so my knowledge and background with copiers is rather limited. I've been losing hair over one of my client's copiers for the past month. They have a used Toshiba e351c. I've been trying desperately to get it fixed.

I've only been able to find a couple Toshiba techs in the area, and both of them flaked out on me. Given my background with computers, I was able to initially diagnose it as a hard drive issue. It was working fine one day and all of a sudden it stopped booting altogether. It would power on and run through its mechanical "checks" but the touchscreen would never get past the initial splash screen. The hard drive was also making a funny noise when you first turned it on.

So, I tried getting "creative" and cloned the disk from my friend's 351c onto a new 80 gig drive. Now the copier will boot up and let you use the interface and so forth, but the network refuses to initialize. I'm running out of ideas here... I can only assume there's now a firmware issue unless the boards have been fried.

I would greatly appreciate any input/help you guys could send my way. If I do need to reload the firmware, could someone please help me in obtaining a copy of it?

Thank you!

[Mr Spock]

If the firmware is not a matched set then strange things occur. You may also need to re-initialize the nic card. Firmware while rather easy to do can go really wrong if not done correctly. If I knew what was on there to begin with I would have better advice. Send me a pm if you need any other help.

[dogg_man]

I agree with Mr Spock, you are venturing into areas which could potentially BRICK your copier. But since you've gotten this far I will toss you one more thing you can try.

The NIC on this machine is not very far off from a PC NIC the major difference is that the NIC on the copier uses a kind of High Density DB 50 pin connector rather than a PCI. Anyways the NIC on the copier is attached if I recall correctly with 2 screws on the face plate portion of the NIC and one on the inside, so you will have to take the back covers off to get access to it. Now I am sure I don't have to tell you to make sure your grounded and the machine is unplugged.

Remove the NIC from the copier to access the jumpers. One jumper allows you to reset it back to factory settings, its says FACT or FACTORY dont recall exactly but switch the jumper, and plug the NIC back in, TURN THE MACHINE ON AND ONCE THE NIC's LINK LIGHTS START TO BLINK ON AND OFF TURN THE MACHINE OFF. Remove the NIC put the jumper back to its original position and put the NIC and covers back together.

Give this a shot but if this does not work you may have no choice but to contact a tech to come out and check out the equipment and verify the firmware version etc etc

PS if you dont know what jumpers are or settings for them do not try this as you could potentially damage the NIC beyond repair.

I am only tossing this out since it seems as you've already opened the back to work with the HDD.

Good Luck and don't forget to update your post as allot of this info is helpful to others.