On Thu, Dec 16, 2004 at 09:20:14PM -0500, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote: > Peter Van Eynde <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote: > >> No; the hardware is damaged. No driver can drive that. The driver > >> you have is a driver for Foomatic Quxer cards. You don't have a > >> Foomatix Quxer; you have a broken pile of junk. > > > > So here you argue that because the firmware is gone the hardware is > > broken, correct? > > No, I argue that because you've pried chips off the board, the > hardware is broken.
Er, no. Flash can be overwritten with invalid data (eg. nulls or interrupting a flash process), rendering drivers that expect a working flash to not work. It's not correct in the general case to say that "no driver can drive that"; some hardware can still be re-flashed to correct the data, so a driver that does have a (usually redundant) copy of the firmware and code to upload it can, in fact, drive the device. However, unlike non-flash devices that need the firmware uploaded every time, the driver is still useful without it. Whether or not the "misflashed hardware is a broken device" analogy is bought, the fact remains that many copies of the hardware still do function, having working firmware. The existance of non-working hardware is irrelevant. -- Glenn Maynard
