Firmware Flash in DOS?

[KR]

Hello,
I bought a laptop DVD-RW drive a (Master) But I needed a (Slave) I was told
by the vendor that I could Flash the drive back to (Slave) by running these
2 files the vendor sent me. He said it had to be done in DOS. I have a
utility.exe file and a bin file. Can this be done in XP? If so, Could some
one talk me through it? The laptop has no floppy drive. If that matters. I
can see the new drive when XP is up and I hot swap the drives. The vendor
said he wasn't sure if XP could do it. He boots Win98 into DOS and does it.
If this dosent work. I have to ship the drive back to him.

TIA

 

[Galen]

In KR had this to say:

My reply is at the bottom of your sent message:

Hello,
I bought a laptop DVD-RW drive a (Master) But I needed a (Slave) I
was told by the vendor that I could Flash the drive back to (Slave)
by running these 2 files the vendor sent me. He said it had to be
done in DOS. I have a utility.exe file and a bin file. Can this be
done in XP? If so, Could some one talk me through it? The laptop has
no floppy drive. If that matters. I can see the new drive when XP is
up and I hot swap the drives. The vendor said he wasn't sure if XP
could do it. He boots Win98 into DOS and does it. If this dosent
work. I have to ship the drive back to him.
TIA

Huh? Slave/Master/Cable Select (CS) is a matter of jumper settings on every
single drive I've put my hands on in a VERY long time and certainly every
single optical drive I've ever come across - which is a few I should
suspect. Pull the drive out of the computer and (why exactly do you need
this?) change the jumper settings to change it's positioning.


--
Galen - MS MVP - Windows (Shell/User & IE)
http://dts-l.org/
http://kgiii.info/

"I am glad of all details, whether they seem to you to be relevant or
not." - Sherlock Holmes

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Hello,
I bought a laptop DVD-RW drive a (Master) But I needed a (Slave) I was told
by the vendor that I could Flash the drive back to (Slave) by running these
2 files the vendor sent me. He said it had to be done in DOS. I have a
utility.exe file and a bin file. Can this be done in XP? If so, Could some
one talk me through it? The laptop has no floppy drive. If that matters. I
can see the new drive when XP is up and I hot swap the drives. The vendor
said he wasn't sure if XP could do it. He boots Win98 into DOS and does it.
If this dosent work. I have to ship the drive back to him.

TIA

Is this an internal DVD drive or an external drive? If it is external,
how do you connect it to the laptop? With a USB cable? Parallel
cable? Other? Does the laptop already have a CD drive?

 

[KR]

It's internal. I built many desk top PC's. But on these small laptop
internal drives..... There are no jumpers. The firmware does it. Believe me
I looked! This is a Toshiba DVD-RW Lightscribe drive. I thought that would
be cool in my Dell Inspirion 9300. They sell them as Master or Slave. He
flashed this one to a master for me. To find out latter I need a Slave.

Ken was here!

Is this an internal DVD drive or an external drive? If it is external,
how do you connect it to the laptop? With a USB cable? Parallel
cable? Other? Does the laptop already have a CD drive?

It's internal. I built many desk top PC's. But on these small laptop
internal drives..... There are no jumpers. The firmware does it. Believe me
I looked! This is a Toshiba DVD-RW Lightscribe drive. I thought that would
be cool in my Dell Inspirion 9300. They sell them as Master or Slave. He
flashed this one to a master for me. To find out latter I need a Slave.

Ken was here!

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

You did not say if your laptop already has an internal
CD drive.

If the new drive uses the same connector as a
laptop hard disk then you can buy a $5.00 adapter
and connect it to a standard desktop PC, using its
IDE cable. This would allow you to flash the drive
to be a slave. Note that there is a risk involved in
doing this: If you connect the adapter back to front
(which is easy) then you will fry the new drive.

 

[KR]

Yes It does already have one. I can get it to show up on the laptop. But I
dont know how to use DOS to run the files to flash the firmware.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

This makes things much easier. You can download a
Win98 boot disk from www.bootdisk.com, using some
desktop PC, then burn a bootable CD based on this boot
disk, again using a desktop PC with a CD burner. Remember
to put the flash files onto the CD too!

You can now boot your laptop into DOS and run the
flash program.

 

[Plato]

Yes It does already have one. I can get it to show up on the laptop. But I
dont know how to use DOS to run the files to flash the firmware.

In the olden days we used to have to flash network cards to set the irq
and other resources. Back then pcs
just booted to dos and you had to type win to start windows. Big brands
were a pain as they had the last line
in autoexec.bat set to start windows automatically so we remmed that out
first.

Anyway, get a bootdisk and copy the flash files and flash util to it,
boot, then go. There should be a readme
someplace to get you started.