Practical Reflash Tuning: Step 1: Downloading Stock ROM
Watch This Course
$229 USD $114.50 USD
-OR-
Or
8 easy payments of only $14.31
Instant access. Easy checkout. No fees.
Step 1: Downloading Stock ROM
03.54
| 00:00 | - The very first step in our six step process is simply to read the stock ROM file out of the ECU. |
| 00:07 | I've already got our HP tuners hardware dongle connected to both the OBD 2 port as well as my laptop, and the car is powered up, but the engine's not running. |
| 00:17 | I'm already comfortable with the battery level in both the car and my laptop, so we can go ahead and press on the Read Vehicle icon which you can see here. |
| 00:28 | Now when we do that, the vehicle reader box opens up, and again, we can click on the Read button, and what that's going to do is perform a read entire so it'll take all of the information out of both the engine control module as well as the transmission control module on an automatic vehicle. |
| 00:46 | So this process does take a few minutes. |
| 00:49 | So we'll just wait while the stock ROM file is downloaded. |
| 00:53 | Once the read is complete out of the ECU, you can see we get this Save As box opens up which is where we can actually give the file a name and physically save it. |
| 01:04 | Before you do that though, I recommend that you turn the car off as if you save the file with the car still powered up and the ignition on, this can sometimes cause some minor issues. |
| 01:15 | So once we've switched the car off, we can give the file a name. |
| 01:18 | Now again, this is going to be up to your own personal preference. |
| 01:22 | I simply recommend that you come up with your own naming strategy that's consistent so you can always find the files you're looking at. |
| 01:31 | Personally, I like to use the registration plate number of the vehicle so I can easily reference it and find it later. |
| 01:38 | So in this case, I'm going to enter the registration which is HEF892, and then I'm going to give it a name of VFHSVR8 which is the model of the vehicle. |
| 01:54 | Then we'll simply call this file Base. |
| 01:57 | So now we've saved our base file. |
| 02:00 | The first time you read from an ECU, you're likely to end up with this particular box popping up that tells you that you've got an unlicensed file. |
| 02:10 | And this means that while you can view the file and you can edit the file, you're not going to be able to actually flash this back into the ECU. |
| 02:18 | In order to do so, you're going to have to licence this particular file. |
| 02:23 | So we can click on the Show Licence options and this will tell us what we need to do. |
| 02:29 | In this case, you can see that a licence for this particular vehicle is going to cost us two GM credits. |
| 02:36 | Word of warning here, once you have pressed OK, you've committed to using those credits and you cannot get them back, so you need to be very careful whether or not you're going to licence the vehicle. |
| 02:51 | Here we can see the number of credits we have available on our HP Tuners hardware dongle, and then in this case, you can see we have eight GM credits available. |
| 03:02 | Of course you can choose not to licence the vehicle, but in that case, you're also not going to be able to make any tuning changes to it. |
| 03:09 | So I'm going to press OK. |
| 03:11 | Again it's going to warn me that this action cannot be undone, and I'm going to click Yes. |
| 03:17 | We now have a licenced file, and we're able to make changes. |
| 03:21 | Now one last thing that I'm going to do now is I'm going to save this file again, and this time, I'm going to give it the title New. |
| 03:33 | So now we have a modified file. |
| 03:35 | This means that our base or stock ROM file is going to be there if we ever want to revert to stock, and there's no danger of us writing over the top of it when we save again. |
| 03:47 | Right, we're ready to move on to the next step in our process. |
