Hi all,
I just got my mpvi 2 in the mail last Saturday and was so excited to get started, when I checked the postal service tracking number Friday night and saw that the delivery was on time, I put my Tahoe on the battery charger, put my laptop on the charger and went to bed with visions of tuner fairies dancing in my head. I woke up Saturday morning to an alert that the package was delivered and I was so excited to start that I didn't even eat breakfast before opening the box and taking a look at the device that I was so excited to finally have in hand, but would later feel like smashing with the biggest hammer I could find in the shop. I ate breakfast then grabbed my laptop and installed the VCM software and decided to try and disable VATS for my very first action.
I headed outside with laptop, keys, mpvi 2 while still in my PJ's. I hooked up everything and read my PCM and saved the file then happily spent my 2 credits to license it without a second thought. Next, I disabled VATS and saved the change to a new file, turned on the ignition, clicked the write button and selected write entire, when I saw the BRICKABLE! text I paused for a moment and my heart raced a little and I thought for a second, "surely HP tuners has good QC and this never actually happens, I have a full battery in my truck, full battery in my laptop, error correcting RAM, xeon CPU, top-of-the-line and never crashes", I weighed my options if I actually did kill my daily driver and thought, "LET'S DO IT!"
Holding my breath, I see the erasing step and get nervous, "Oh man, there's no going back now!", then I see flashing...1%...2%...3%....3.2%....3.2%....3.2%... .......3.2%....."write failed", I screamed profanities that shall not be repeated here, cycled the ignition and tried again...1%...2%...2.1%....2.1%....2.1%..........2. 1%....."write failed", at this point I felt physically sick, I tried to crank the engine...nothing...now sitting there in the ever-increasing Kansas humidity and heat...I couldn't believe my eyes that my luck could be so bad.
I packed up, locked up and went back into the house and began what turned into spending the rest of my weekend googling and trying to find ways to revive my dead PCM, everything I tried failed miserably and I decided that I would have to start combing junkyards for a used PCM from a '03-'06 4x4 5.3L drive-by-wire 4.10 rear-end truck. That was plan A, plan B was to buy a background debugger that I could solder to my dead PCM and possibly flash it back to at the very least, a state where the PCM bootloader would talk to me. On Monday I located a wiring harness so I could do this on the bench next time and I located a PCM at another junkyard, but would have to wait for the junkyard to pull it for me, they wouldn't let me sneak back and do the simple 5 minute job myself. On Tuesday I got the call that my '03 pcm from a GMC yukon was ready, I went and picked it up and ran home as fast as I could and popped it in my truck...cranked it and fired right up then just as quickly it sputtered to a halt..."crap", I thought, "I need to disable VATS", then I fired up hp tuners and read the pcm...and you know where this goes...I go to write my VATS-disabled tune and..."DOH! I already spent my credits to brick my original PCM"...I thought about it for a second and relented that the only way I was going to get this turd to run was to shell out another $100. I grabbed the largest crowbar I could find and pried open my wallet and disgustedly clicked the checkout button. powered up my bench harness and in a deja-vu, licensed the file, selected write entire and clicked write. Palms sweaty and heart racing i watched every 0.1% of the flash for 4 minutes and FINALLY! "success"..."cleaning up"...I ran out to my truck as fast as I could with the new PCM and snapped it in and turned the key....vrooom! listening for a few seconds..."yep still running!".
Now I'm feeling slightly better that my truck is running again, but still so angry about the wasted money.
Now I sit here in the wee hours of Thursday morning writing this as I'm considering if there is any way I'll get my 2 credits back, now I'm even wondering if I even manage to revive my dead PCM will I get the tune the box that I already paid for the privilege of tuning? Hard to know, I'll have to flash a bin from someone else if the background debugger actually works, because I don't have my original bin file and hpt won't let you extract it, which is a really lame move on hp tuner's part. so the question will be, if I unbrick my original PCM using a factory OS bin from someone else will HP tuners do the morally-right thing and allow me to use the license with the hardware I paid to use it with?
Only the next few days will tell...
If there is a way to get a bin from an hpt or if it will respect the PCM's serial number...we will see.
The next week will decide if I praise hp tuners or curse them in every public forum I can find.
sincerely,
A sour IT guy that just wanted to have a little weekend fun