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ccatalyst

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hello everyone, i have an original taito x3 arcade game - sonic blast heroes dash, and the hdd that came with it is a crappy little notebook drive, every now and then i hear the heads clicking, so it is just a matter of time before this drive dies. I cloned the drive using the usual disconnecting the hd while the game is on and then transferring the drive while it is still on to another pc and cloning it while it is unlocked. after my clone was completed i disabled the security in cmos in the x3 system and tried to boot the cloned drive, and it did boot , it got past the windows boot section but then gave me a blue screen with white lettering saying system error 2903, i have looked all over the forums but cannot find anything to tell me what that is or how to bypass it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
Ok so i have gotten a bit further, i am pretty sure that error is coming up because the img file in which the game is stored cannot be decrypted, I noticed that there is a file in the root of c: called tdegboot, i believe this program runs some sort of check against the drive and sees if there if it is locked, if it is not locked then it fails the decryption, if i disable the security by going into cmos, it gets right up to the point that it is about to start decrypting the game and says please wait, then it gives the error 2903, if i boot the backup disks with security disabled it wont even boot the drive, i have gone through the original disk while it is unlocked with a hex editor and compared it my backup and i could not find a single byte off, i compared from sector 0000 through 4000. I also used certain drive tools to make sure that the model #, serial # and firmware all matched, i did notice that diskinfo gave me a slightly different model designation than the drive did when i was using a hex editor, but i changed the model number to both names, and it did not make a difference. I am also trying to find a way to decrypt the img file, if i could find a way or someone that could do that, then i could just create a batch to launch the img file and run it through bat to exe and rename it to tdegboot so that it would launch the unencrypted game. Now i could be wrong on all of this, But i am trying to guess my way through this in the hopes that this might help someone who needs to backup a failing x3 drive in the future.
 
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If ATA user password is removed from your drive backup, you won't be able to play it with dongle on your TX3 in that way. TX3 checks the drive before initializing.
 
will have to try it without the dongle, to see if that will work, i do not have the ata password on the original drive, and have not figured out how to extract it from an unlocked original drive, i do not have a sata protocol analyzer, so i have to keep searching for a way around this.
 
well tried it with and without the dongle, same 2903 error.have to find a way to copy that ata password over to the clone drive, any one have any ideas?
 
Hi,

I have the same problem. Has a solution been found?
I unlocked my HDD and got error 2903.
I think that it is necessary to replace the TDEGboot.exe but I do not find any.

bye
 
Depending on the drive that the x3 had previous there's some options. The easiest are X3 that had WD drives. Basically what you need to do is get another WD platter drive to replace the existing, clone the drive and then use https://wdmarvel.com/en/ WD Marvel to obtain the drive password from the existing locked drive.

From there lock the new drive with the password and change the drive's model/serial number to match the older WD drive and it should be back to stable. I used this method to repair my P&D X3. This method only works for WD drives, no other manufacturer has a tool of the same caliber. The WD SSD drives don't behave with WD Marvel either as a warning.
 
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