RUINED Drive, DVD and maybe CDRW.

Technarch

Today wasn't my day.

In an attempt to try and figure out if GHR8 firmware was the reason why the ATI DVD player was occassionally skipping because I was getting in event viewer ideport1 did not respond within timeout period errors starting in june which is when ghr8 came out, I wanted to try and do GHR6 that the 163D came with. This was a reasonable suspicion.

Drives were in cable select mode which works great in normal operation, and both had discs in them (OOPS!). I forgot to take the dvd disc out and the CDRW had a win98 cd to boot from.

d/led mtkflash 1.62..
Typed in mtkflash 4 W /A0 /B back00.bin then mtkflash 4 W /A1 /B back01.bin then rebooted computer as per instructions.

both drives are dead the cdrw which was primary master just has a green light on and doesn't respond. the dvd doesn't do anything at all.

i move the jumpers to master and slave from cable select because i want to try again and save the drive.

Power up only the dvdrom and boot. The drive spins up! What is going on? Faster! Faster! Boom!! the rental movie shatters into a million pieces and the drive tray opens slightly from the force of the internal explosion. I pull it out part of the way. It's totally fragmented. I have to go to Walmart after this to buy a replacement to return to the video store.

The drive is a complete writeoff, the dvd has gone to dvd heaven.

All I have left is a CDRW that was killed.. it hasn't exploded, so I'll have to try and find a mtkflash 6S0F binary somewhere.. I hope it wasn't lost too. This is all very expensive hit to take.

All I can think of that I did wrong is:
1) The mtkflash program may not be compatible with cable select mode, but everything else is. (I think this is the culprit since it makes no sense at all my cdrw stopped working too.)
2) Forgot to take the dvd out of tray, I don't see why this would have been the problem, I was in DOS.

What a shitty day. I can't afford to replace this hardware for probably another month or two now.

dhc014

Oh man, that's a bad one

Always unplug any other drive that is not being flashed. Especially if they are on the same cable and even worse if they are in cable select mode! You can probably recover the CD-RW drive, but the DVD-ROM may have been damaged inside by the DVD shattering, or the motor may have burned out.

Plug the CD-RW in by itself as secondary salve if possible and disable it in BIOS. Use MTK WinFlash in Direct IDE Port Mode to flash a binary firmware onto your drive. Hopefully that will work.

Binary firmwares can be found in alexnoe's archive here: http://www.alexander-noe.de/Firmwares

__________________
.:: Dave | http://dhc014.rpc1.org ::.

Technarch

Thanks for the kind words.

Well, I tried fixing the CDRW just now.. it's jumpered as a master on secondary channel by itself as the DVD is in the trash. Turned off in BIOS. D/Led the 6s0f from the page you gave and ran 1.62 mtkflash by booting from a safe mode command prompt from a floppy disk.

It flashed all 6 banks and said update ok and gave a checksum of something like 3CEE and said to reboot computer.

So I've done that.. Power up, all I get is the same lit green light .. the drive itself doesn't say hello to either windows or the bios. (I haven't removed the CD from the inside, it shouldn't REALLY matter should it? I can't find a paperclip at the moment.)

I'm getting the feeling the cdrw is also dead, which is a drag because I've used it for all of maybe 10 burns since I got it.
I'll try one more time with a paperclip to get the CD out, but I don't hold out much hope for success. I remember reading some time ago for people to 'be careful' with WSES or something, a program I've never used because it can 'erase' your drive and not even mtkflash can get it back.. maybe something similiar has happened here when my dvdrom flash went bad, and not in a girls gone bad way either.

Sigh.

dhc014

Also try flashing with an older version of mtkflash, try 1.48, then 1.55

__________________
.:: Dave | http://dhc014.rpc1.org ::.

KBDE

Damn that sucks, i feel the pain

About fixing the RW drive, Indeed try some other (older) versions of mtkflash.
Also try setting it to slave. I also can not flash my drives with mtkflash if the drive is set on master. slave works through.

Goodluck

Technarch

Well an update.. a mixed bag of results..

Tried putting the drive to slave and used 1.48 mtkflash with it.
It worked and the drive rebooted. (Took the CD out first too.)

So Windows sees the cdrw and the system can read from it.. to a point.

There is a problem.

It's now a 15x CLV reader according to nero cd speed with the occassional yellow line.

I tried with mtkflash, liteon's flasher and mtkwinflash for 6S0D.

It's still missing functionality.. What is happening here exactly?

I also bought a Pioneer DVD-120 romdrive to replace the 163D with today. The tray version not the slot because I read that the slots are slightly noisier at high speeds. Will install it shortly.

Technarch

Yay a happy ending..

Put the two drives back into CSEL mode (which IS cool, needs 80 wire cables tho) and the Litey in the master position.

Reflashed it yet again with the liteon flasher for 6s0f and now I can read at full speed again and burning seems fine too.. did scans and stuff.. I am MILDLY worried that when the green 'read' light was lit on the cdrw before I fixed it, the drive was doing something, but probably not.. no harm done but I wish I knew for sure.. it's graphs for read is fine tho, as is it's error count.

So I only lost the dvd movie, and the rom drive for it.

The Pioneer 120 is firmware limited to a max read speed of 40x (that's ok) but it does seem quieter than the Liteon it replaced.

So I guess I don't need to buy a new CDRW now.. too bad, I kind of was looking forward to it, but it's good not to have to spend the money yet.

Quakester2000

Im happy to see that it wasnt a totall loss of your drives. That would have been really unlucky.

Namoh

Well, you can still kill your drive!!

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