PLS Read! Plexwriter give garbage in BIOS!

CD, DVD and (Ultra HD) Blu-ray Writers Plextor Writer
#1

Hi,

I have a Plextor 121032A

It is refusing to work and on booting the PC, when the Plextor is detected just after memory check, the IDE string displayed consists of part garbage, like computer language…but normally does say Plextor. :mad:

Sometimes IT is detected ok, sometimes it fails to detect and return garbage. My bios DOES see something, but it is not really sure what it is.

I tried to do a reflash in dos… it worked, this time it was recoqnized so i can flash OK, but trying to read the disc…uhuhuhuh no way jose

If I can boot to WinXP, the Plextor can’t be accessed at all, not to READ or WRITE, won’t even display contents of CD…I thinks it’s $tuffed.

Hope someone can assist pleasez.

Cheerz Ken

#2

Have you tried swapping IDE cables, that you know work?

And If you have another computer, you might want to try another power supply, but use each of my suggestions one at a time… this way you can narrow down the variables and figure out how to fix it…

#3

Thanks for the advice, i did trie every possible combination on both the ide channels. Even attached ONLY my plextor to the ide port, same results… sometimes garbage in bios while autodetecing and sometimes a perfect detection BUT when windows is started and i want to read/write the drive… it locks up.

Even tried booting with a bootdisk, generic cdrom drivers. It sometimes DOES detect the cdrom even though it was not listed in the bios. IT also give perfect information about the drive like ID and firmware etc.

But again when trying to read… nothing

#4

I had a simliar problem with the garbled letters in my BIOS when I had a bad IDE cable… I changed the cable, and all the problems are gone…

#5

If you’ve tried a new IDE-cable and using the drive in a different computer, as poopeyhed2 suggested, then I think you can conclude the Plextor drive is broken starbbs. Perhaps you can re-flash the drive and see if that helps but I doubt it. I had the same problem too once with a hard disk drive. It gave a garbage ID-strong when booting and the drive was simply broken. Good luck!

#6

Damn !!! my beloved plextor is gone… i did not tried other cables cause the 2 that are in my pc work ok with my harddrives… i switched to primary/secondary as master and slave… nothing.

I could flash it though… but when i put a CD into the tray, the light stays led. It does not goes out… probably cause it cannot initialise…when i get the cd out (any cd) it is recoqnized in windows now… but when a cd is inserted…nothing. Windows also locks up until i release the cd.

No blinking lites etc…

#7

As a last resort you can check TROUBLESHOOTING: Blink Codes PlexWriter 12/10/32A…