TR Forums

http://www.plextor.be/english/products/pxw121032.html

not 100% sure i understand this, but:

http://www.plextor.be/english/technical ... 210TA.html

the firmware upgrade is on v1.10 and my info via windows says my
plextor is at v1.08 right now. i tried to download this new firmware
and run it. and it always fails...

v1.09 fixes something very important to me. this is the same problem i told frobozz about:

While the drive was playing, a read command issued by Ahead's Nero software could cause the drive to hang

only thing i saw is in the FAQ why firmware fails is this:

Q: (10/12/02) What can I do if the firmware upgrade is failing ?
A: By enabling the DMA jumper on the rear of the cdr, the firmware upgrade should work fine.

dma jumper? eh?! wtf? eh? o_O

Does it give you an error when it fails? (what does the error say?)

Perhaps try booting into safe mode to try it?

gleek, does the drive's LED flash in a certain repeating pattern. If so, refer to Plextor's technical website where you should find a page that tells what the flashing means.

Do you have DMA enabled?

My old Plextor 12/10/32A is still going strong in my mother's PC.

I don't know anything about DMA being required to burn firmware, but in addition to anything you might have to do (jumpers, etc) to enable DMA on the hardware itself you also have to make sure Windows is using it. You should check to see if Windows thinks it's on first (and if it isn't, see if you can turn it on).

k whats the quickest way to check to see if DMA is on/off on a cd drive?

thegleek wrote:

k whats the quickest way to check to see if DMA is on/off on a cd drive?

Right-click My Computer, choose properties (can also get here through the System applet in control panel)
Select the Hardware Tab
Choose Device Manager
Expand the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers node
Now, it gets a little tricky. Do you know which channel your optical drive is on? (It's customary in systems with just one HD and one optical drive to put the HD on the primary channel and the optical on the secondary, but that's just a convention). If you know, right click on the channel and choose properties, and select the Advanced Settings tab. If you don't know which channel your optical drive is on, you're going to have to look at both of them.

There are two devices per channel; if there's nothing connected then the "Current Tranfer mode" will read "Not Applicable" For both your HD and your optical drive you want it to read Ultra DMA Mode (and then a number -- the HD will likely have a higher number). If one of them reads PIO, then that's probably your optical drive and it's not doing DMA. You can try changing it (it's fairly safe to do this with an optical drive; less so with a HD). Windows generally tries to put devices into DMA mode, but if it hits a sequence of errors it will back it off to PIO.