? Possibly Corrupt Firmware Written

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

Hi,

I’ve got a BENQ CD+RW drive that I’ve had for a couple of years now. When I first used InfoTool on it, it showed the information as expected, but at some point (I don’t know exactly when, but I’m fairly certain it was after upgrading some different firmware versions a few times) it shows everything as expected except for the serial number. I am 99.99% sure that it used to show a proper serial number, but now it shows ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ.

Notice that those are 30 0xFF characters (aka binary “blanks”, like NULLs). I can’t find a raw copy of the firmware to check, but either it contains this sequence of characters somewhere, possibly as padding, or else (and this is more likely), the upgrade app did not stop writing the firmware when it should have and wrote FFs/-1s when it ran out of actual data. Either way, part of the drive’s firmware seems to have gotten overwritten that should not have.

I have tried burning different firmware versions, including older ones, but they don’t fix it (probably because they don’t include the serial number and are not meant to write that part.)

I should point out that this is the only abnormality and that it seems to work fine otherwise.

Does anyone have any ideas on what may have happened and hopefully how to fix it? :confused:

#2

IIRC drives serial number is stored in a non-flashable area, aka boot sector. Can’t see how ordinary flashing of drive will effect this.

No idea why latest InfoTool doesn’t display this for you.
But I’ve had the same experience on some BenQ DVDRW’s when crossflashing to other models.

#3

I guess one thing I could try is to use an older version of InfoTool to see if maybe it’s that which is the problem. I’m going to see if I can find an old version and test it today.

Oh, and InfoTool also shows the Benq CDRW as having 2083KB of buffer which just seems odd. :confused:

#4

:confused: :rolleyes:

Don’t trust anything Infotool shows you.

#5

Ooh, snap. :stuck_out_tongue: Actually, I did try to find another program to display info on the drive to determine whether it is InfoTool or not. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find any. I looked in my CDVD tools folders and was shocked to see that none of the many utilities in there would give me info on the drive. :confused:

#6

Try to use Discinfo by Hijacker. :wink:

#7

[QUOTE=chef;1800743]Try to use Discinfo by Hijacker. ;)[/QUOTE]

Thanks for the tip. I tried Discinfo and it displayed the serial number of my DVD writer correctly, but displayed the CD writer as “n/a”. :confused:

It did have a serial number before (once upon a time), but I suspect that it was wiped out by a firmware update at some point (unfortunately I did not notice it, so I don’t know at what point), and flashing the original version doesn’t fix it.