Hey Guys.

Hopefully someone can shed some light on the issue I am having. A month ago I bought a completely stock 2009 Cobalt SS TC Sedan. I am the 2nd owner and the previous owner was an older man that bought the car brand new and unloaded it once he passed 100K on the car in just 3 years. He strictly used this for company travel and besides normal maintenance nothing was done to the car (from what I was told and saw).

I have owned an HP tuner for years and well I wanted to license my Cobalt and start doing a basic tune to it. Well I went to link up with my car and I am getting a read VCM error 0. The guy at HP it saying it could be because it was previously tuned and locked?

I know others have reported having issues trying to get HP tuners to read the PCM’s. Some give suggestions of doing a series of things before reading but no luck for me. I may try pulling the radio fuse being in another car I tuned years ago the Onstar would cause HP tuners not to be able to read being the BUS was busy. I will try this on mine I guess.

However HP tuners said this: Read failed at location 0 means theres an issue with the pcm, not comms. It means right at the beginning of the read it failed, it got through comms without issue. So that would mean me pulling the radio fuse won't do anything.

I tried changing from cruse to non-cruse mod to see if maybe it did have one of those “select” a tune but didn’t notice any difference.

I did contact Trifecta to find out if they ever tuned my car.

Below is the information I pulled from my HP tuner when connected to my car.

Type: Chevy Cobalt (I4) 2009, E77
VCM ID: 86YRUD482640202
ECM OS ID: 12629314 [Editor] [Scanner] E77
ECM Calibration IDs: 12629314 12633168 12629325 12629326
ECM Seed: 0

 

The os id matches up and all the segment id's match with an 09 css so that's a good start. Not to ask a stupid question here, but I just need to be sure. I assume that the ignition was keyed to accessory on and your scanner wasn't connected while you were trying to do the read right? Does the vin you posted from hptuners match up with the car's vin?

If all from above is good then there's a good chance the car may have been Trifecta tuned.

 

Sorry I didn't read all of it.

This really sucks. What did Vince at Trifecta say?

 

I'll "me too" what the guys have already said. Sounds like Trifecta was already there.

 

Vince has confirmed they have never touched my car. So that's good to hear but still question whats up with my PCM then?

HP tuners wants me to send them now my debug.dat file to have their engineers find out whats going on. I am waiting for a reply back to where I find this file.

I had the key to the position right before you would turn to "crank" the engine over. I turned off auto lights and everything else inside the car. Also the scanner program wasn't open when I was trying to read the PCM.

I will double check the vin but the # looks correct to me.

What Vince said in a reply to me:

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the email.

I show no records of doing a tune for this vehicle, nor a layer tune via BYT, et al.

- Vince Geglia
Trifecta Performance, Inc.

 

close hpt, find your hpt folder, delete the suite.cfg file.

 

And what opening it back up rebuilds the file?

 

yep. more or less a forced reset of it. you will need to copy/paste your key again though.