well time for a little sad story.

i couldn't enable dma on my lite-on dvd-rom drive (ltd-163) for some reason. it use to work, then one day it just showed up as pio rather than dma.

anyways so i decided i would see if i could flash the firmware and get it to work with dma again. this is something i had done several times before with no bad repercussions.

well anyways i'm sure you can all see where this is headed. for some reason something went wrong and my computer got the blue screen while flashing. i rebooted and it just wouldn't boot unless i disconnected the drive in question.

i attempted once already to save the drive by booting to dos and flashing with mtkflash, but to no avail.

so i think it might be time for a new drive.

does anyone have any suggestions (or want to sell me one for cheap?)

i like lite-on and i am thinking of just buying another replacement for the same drive.

i suppose it might be time to make the jump to plextor though.

in any case i will be using the drive mostly for reading dvd-roms, backing up CDs, and backing up DVDs (and maybe the occasional game in there somewhere).

any suggestions are quite welcome!

You could pickup one the LiteOn DVD burners. It's not even worth buying a ROM drive anymore.

An easy trick is to unistall the secondary IDE controller (through device manager) and restart windows. Usually the drive will be recognised correctly after the restart.

Also flashing your drive too many times isn't such a good idea, since the flash memory of the drive can't withstand a big number of write cycles.

It very much looks like damaged IDE cable. Many IDE drivers automatically fall-back to (s)lower DMA or PIO modes when they detect transfer errors between controller and the drive. The fact that flashing failed would also prove that. Anyway, as the drive's firmware is corrupted now, it's rather gone, but before plugging some new one, get a new 80-conductor IDE ribbon.

rutra i think you hit the nail on the head with that one. i played around all afternoon with drives i knew worked fine, but all had issues with the ide cable when trying to use more than one drive on the channel

well thanks to new egg i think i will be getting dvd rom, 3 brand spankin new ide cables (probably round ones because they are cheaper it would seem) and maybe ill throw in a 120 gig hd for fun.

i heard a while back that round ide cables can have bad performance... is this still an issue at all (i remember reading this when they first became commercially available)

And that big number is ...? 10,000? 100? For all practical purposes flash memory can be written to ad infinitum. Flashing with a firmware that targets a different model - a common practice among LiteOn users - can mess up a drive, though.


Unsustantiated rumors. Round IDE cable will have the same "performance" as ribbone ones, but they won't obstruct the airflow in the case as much. I've used them for the past two years with no complaints.

excellent to hear regarding the cables.

whatever would make you think i would flash to a different firmware?

Methinks I heard a confession.

I swear by both my Plextor and Lite-On drives.

A friend just bought a new Plextor, non-premium.

I wish he would stop raving about it.

You are right, I was under the false impression that EEPROM chips are not as reliable as flash memory, but actually they can withstand at least 10,000 write cycles. So, flash away