Crossflashing and Region Free Firmware

[gonwk]

Gonwk yes it is I just bought a internal drive that is Sony/Optiarc.

THANKS Doc!

G!

[cynthia]

Hi Cynthia,

I went to "Firmware HQ" but I did not see my Gateway M-6862 Silver laptop DVD drive ... it is "Optiarc DVD RW AD-7563A WX05" according to Nero DiscSpeed 5.

Do you know if my Firmware "WX05" is the latest!?!? And I think Optiarc is owned by Sony ... right?

Thanks,

G!

The issue with a drive like that is that is more or less hopeless to find any updates for such a drive by just looking at the Gateway homepage and to go through the various models manually takes ages and I'm still not sure you find what you are looking for.

http://support.gateway.com/support/drivers/ddaStep.asp?Tab=All

and according to this thread it could be either of two original models - so how to know which to set as master for the cloned one?

True, Sony is now the owner of Optiarc.

[gonwk]

Hi Cynthia,

Thanks for the link.

Gateway is probably one of the Worst laptop companies to have all the needed Firmware or Drivers updates. They Only provide what they want and that is it.

Well, my Optiarc is working OK so far ... but since I did not see my Model on "Firmware HQ" ... I was just curious.

Thanks,

G!

[soup]

I have a Samsung SH-S162L DVD drive, I found a region free firmware and flashed the drive with S162L.TS08.patched-rpc1. I looked at what region that the drive was set to after flashing to the patched firmware. It was set to none, but I had only 2 region changes left. I have never played around with changing the drive to the different regions. Shouldn't there be 4 region changes left, like the Pioneer drive that I have.

If you were to flash that back to normal, the count would or should go back to 4, it has happened to me. Don't know if it's a Samsung thing or not, it's been a while since I remember it happening.

[doctorhardware]

Soup you are a Genius, that is what it was. I reflashed it back to TS08 firmware that was not region free. So the region free causes the number of region changes to drop to 2. Thanks for the heads up on that one.

[doctorhardware]

Gonwk that new drive is very nice getting some nice burns with it. I have posted a couple of burns that I have posted. So take a look and see what you think.