Laser Hot - Pioneer DVD-R/RW emergency firmware upgrade (free)

[hoopyfrood]

If not laser hot, then at least a hot laser - hot enough to fry the drive:


From the cnet story

"Representatives from Pioneer Electronics USA, based in Long Beach, Calif., said that writing to blank 4x DVD-R and 2x DVD-RW discs can cause its DVD-rewritable PC drives and DVD recorders to freeze.

If the drives or recorders remain frozen for longer than five minutes, the optical lens, which writes to the discs, can overheat and render the hardware inoperable."


Drives affected are listed in the article and do include the DVR-A03/A04 and DVR-A103/104 and presumably any re-badges that use those pioneer drives/firmware. No word on whether the firmware upgrade can be applied to non-pioneer badged drives.

 

[GCasa]

According to Pioneer,

The problem is only with the NEW high speed media. 4x DVD-R / 2x DVD-RW. I have not seen this stuff available to the public yet.

Aparently there is a bug with the firmare for the Pioneer A03, A04, and the DVR-7000. I don't think it is an emergency at this time, but If you have one of these drives, it should be on your "to do" list.

Here is a link for the firmware and more info.

Pioneer Firmware Page

 

[bsobel]

Missed this, thank you!

Off to update the drive....
Bill

 

[Fritoz]

Bump to warn folks...

Also, if you bought one of the CompGeeks OEM models like I did a few months back, you can get the firmware for it from this page. It's a rebadge, originally intended for Compaq...

Compaq OEM link

 

[FastFredE]

Thanks for the heads up! I have the DVR-104 (A04) and just upgraded my firmware to the new 1.33 version with no problems.

 

[allenlh]

Cool... that was easy...

Bump for others! (don't forget, if you have a Cendyne, it's also a Pioneer, 104 upgrade worked flawlessly for me)

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: hoopyfrood
If not laser hot, then at least a hot laser - hot enough to fry the drive:


From the cnet story

"Representatives from Pioneer Electronics USA, based in Long Beach, Calif., said that writing to blank 4x DVD-R and 2x DVD-RW discs can cause its DVD-rewritable PC drives and DVD recorders to freeze.

If the drives or recorders remain frozen for longer than five minutes, the optical lens, which writes to the discs, can overheat and render the hardware inoperable."


Drives affected are listed in the article and do include the DVR-A03/A04 and DVR-A103/104 and presumably any re-badges that use those pioneer drives/firmware. No word on whether the firmware upgrade can be applied to non-pioneer badged drives.

Wow, neat. I know this comment is slightly OT, but I have a similar problem with an older Magneto-Optical drive, a SCSI EPSON OMD-6020. It has a firmware bug or something, so I have to disable Disconnect. Before I discovered that, sometimes the drive would hang (firmware hang), and one time, the laser was stuck ON. Melted a nice little pit in the plastic substrate of one of the disks. Makes you wonder about what viruses could do to CD-RW drives, if they were able to hack/patch the firmware. Imagine viruses capable of actually starting your computer (via the CD-RW drive) on fire... imagine them all secretly set to trigger on a certain date. (Makes the "chernobyl" virus pale by comparison. That one would only just wipe your mobo flash BIOS.)

PS. If anyone knows where to find a firmware update for this old thing, I would be much obliged, but I don't have much hope for updates for hardware this old. The drive also has problems supporting zone-sectored 230MB MO disks properly. It recognizes them, but doesn't write to them properly.

 

[climb4]

^ thanks

 

[Shippy]

The real hot deal would be to use Gradius's 1.33 firmware. It's the 1.33 firmware but has been patched RPC-1 (Region Free) as well as it allows 2x writing on ALL media. But don't be sad when you burn your crappy 1x media at 2x and produce coasters...

 

[vladgur]

your link is f-up