Did you disable your primary HDD in your bios or disconnect the it from the power supply?

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No I didn't know you had to do that. Anyway I put the VIA card back in the old PC and flashed using a floppy, it took me a few goes to get the timing right for reading/backing up the original fw but all read and flashed the cfw without any issues.

I haven't got a backup to try but I have tested an original game and that works fine so hopefully backups will be OK.

Thanks for all your help Lord Sesshomaru

You don't have to disable your primary HDD, sometimes that error message will pop up because your MBR is on your primary HDD and people disable their primary HDD for the flash process or disconnect it from their PSU. Either way, glad you got it sorted! Be sure to make several backups of your original firmware, just in case you ever need the drive key or flash it back to stock.

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