The Firmware Page

For those experiencing poor performance from their Pioneer DVD Rom.
My calibration enabled me to:

- Reads CDs faster
- Reads RWs (period).
- Reads DVDs better.
- Eliminated a lot of DVD/CD/CDRW seek/click problems.

[Edit by dhc014] New Link: http://ca.geocities.com/duren_959@roger ... index.html

http://members.rogers.com/danis/dvd/index.htm

Hope someone can make use of it.

Enjoy

Hi! It's a good idea, but my Pioneer 116 1.22 RCP1 stiil works like a new after 19 months.

Maybe in a year or two I'll need to adjust it, don't know.

Awesome tutorial, Duren!!!

I will have to put a link to this on my page...
This is excellent information. I hope you can find a similar thing in other CD/DVD appliance (I have a Sony audio system that can't read my old CD-R's).

One thing you might want to add to this excellent tutorial is to use a felt tip pen to mark the position of the knobs BEFORE you change anything.
Just draw a visible line on any radius, so that if you ever want to get back to the original position, you just have to realign both segments.
This is how the pros do it

It is great tutorial...however I had to make a choice if I want to read original or burned CDs becouse there was about a quarter of the [*Profanity*] difference between these two. And for those who decide to try it: Dont try the CDs upside down..it works..however I did so first time and I found out that if you turn the DVD-ROM into right position after you adjusted the [*Profanity*] and you are pleased with the adjusting you have made you will soon find out that the dvd isnt reading like the time when you were adjusting it. That is becouse of gravity I think. After you turn it to the right position the gravity does a small difference between the optics and makes your DVD useless. Anyway thnx for the tutorial.

WoW!

I have a Pioneer A04 which has given me nothing but trouble since the day I bought it (less than a year ago). I had no receipt and Pioneer refused to take the drive in for repair without proof of purchase etc etc etc.

To cut a long story short, I had tried just about everything to get my drive to burn DVD's and even read some. It would write the Lead-In then spit the dvd out with an error! All brandsm although the dark purple Ritek dye seemed to be stable!

Anyhoo, I came across your tutorial and thought I would have a look inside my drive, even if just to clean the laser.

To open mine up, I had the drawer ejected and removed 4 [*Profanity*], unclipped the front panel and lifted off the top lid.

While open, drawer facing me, rear of drive facing away, I noticed on the left hand side of the laser a small white block with a very small [*Profanity*] on it.

So remembering your tutorial, I took it upon myself that this [*Profanity*] might help. I turned the [*Profanity*] quarter of a turn and in doing so, my laser moved from a tilted (small tilt) to a more flat/horizontal level.

A small turn of the [*Profanity*] further and the laser moved back to the very small slant. So I turned the [*Profanity*] back 1/4 of a turn and again the laser moved back to the horizontal.

I thought it best to not tamper too much, so I put the drive back together (even forgetting to clean the laser) and powered everything up.

And from then on, every dvd disc I have put in my Pioneer has been read, no clicking on trying to access the discs, and no more errors just after the Lead-In had been completed.

I really cannot thank you enough for your tutorial. Although it is for a different drive and the [*Profanity*] aint anywhere near where I found the one I turned, your tutorial gave me food for thought and the balls to go messin about with trying to calibrate my laser.

I sure hope more people find your tutorial and it can help them also.

But remember (to those reading), this worked for me, it may do so for you. But as the old saying goes - If it aint broke, don't try to fix it.

I only gave it a go on a spur of the moment as I was gonna clean my laser. In the end, a quarter turn of a [*Profanity*] has saved me around 200 quid on a new drive. I am a very happy chappy indeed

Thank you so much Duren - you are a star man. Have a few virtual beers on me buddy

Thanks for that!

I did start to wonder whether this could be the problem with my 106S, which has problems ripping some pressed DVD-9 discs and won't rip any DVD-Rs apart from Ritek G04s. However the drive has recently been mis-detected by Windows on startup, with a popup saying it's found new hardware, followed by the name of the drive, except corrupted slightly. I think it's toast

PS. In totally pedantic mode, I noticed this from your site:

It doesn't actually go back to the beginning at the layer change, it reads the second layer "backwards" as it were. The official name for a dual layer disc is RSDL, which stands for Reverse Spiral Dual Layer.

My 3-year old AOpen DVD-1040 (Pioneer DVD-114 oem) recently began acting up in the same manner as described by Duren... i.e. clicking, spinning down and up, etc.

I've opened the drive and have found the two [*Profanity*] (referred to as knobs by Duren's web page) to adjust CD/DVD alignment. But... how am I supposed to adjust these tiny [*Profanity*]? A [*Profanity*] certainly won't fit in there, especially not at the angle that is required. Did you disassemble the drive further to obtain easy access to those [*Profanity*]?

Scott

(P.S. I've already purchased a Lite-On XJ-HD165H as a replacement, but I still wouldn't mind getting the Pioneer back into working condition for use in a different system.)

I was wondering if this might help my Pioneer A06S/106S read overburnt CDs any better?

When attempting to read overburnt CDs, I get the clicking which is described. Otherwise reading CDs, DVDs or any other media is no problem at this moment!

I may just RMA the drive if it is still in it's warranty though.

Look forward to some comments though. Not so much on RMAing the drive, but if the method will possibly allow the drive to read overburnt CDs.

Very great, man!


I will make use of your tutorial if I'm getting in trouble with one of my drives/burners.


Thank you very much!

My Pioneer-106 is about 2 years old and has been perfect up until the last few months when i found that when ripping dvd's dvdr's it would occasionally throw up bad sector errors which my other drives passed straight through perfectly. I was beginning to think my trusty drive was on its way out. That is until I saw the tutorial. I knew it could be done with ps2's but never knew really how to do it with the slot loader, i was always a bit scared of opening the mechanism thinking it would a nightmare to get down to the laser. How wrong i was, two minutes to remove the back a quick twiddle with a [*Profanity*], rebooting and testing, and then another small correction because i had been too zealous the first time and voila, good as new. Stratch that, I don't think my 106s ever preformed this good, them troublesome fast forwards in windvd are instantious now and chapter switchs are instant

if your brave enough its well worth the attempt, mind you if it aint broke in the first place don't try and fix it lol

is it possible that after updating firmware you may need to re-calibrate the drive?

i have seen the same issue a few times on this forum, which recently happened to me, which is some toshiba drives cant read dvds after updating but they can still read and write cds fine.

the symptoms while trying to read dvds suggest calibration problems (clicking, constant stopping and trying to re-read) and since it still reads and writes cds perfectly it wouldnt suggest a lens problem...

does anyone know how to calibrate a toshiba sd-r6012 drive? would it have the same 2 [*Profanity*] adjustment thing as the pioneer because i opened it up and saw 2 small [*Profanity*] next to eachother near the laser that werent attaching anything...

im willing to try with a bit of guidance... its pointless having a DVD-RW drive that doesnt read or write dvds... :p

Amazing tutorial!

I was having lots of seeking problems with my SONY DDU1621 DVD ROM. Using information from the tutorial, I was able to eliminate 90% reading problems.

Holy [*Profanity*], it's been like two years and it's still making people happy!

Excellent! I've had many responses in my email too, I'm glad I've been able to contribute something to the community... it's too bad I ended up frying my drive before I got a chance to finish calibrating it... don't worry, it was unrelated to the calibration procedure, I took a shortcut and shoved it in a USB bay so I wouldn't have to reboot the computer so many times, and after too much on off flicking, one of them caused the stupid thing to surge my drive, I think, by the time it was done, the bay didn't work either, it fried the IDE cable in it too (once i replaced the IDE cable the bay was fine)... I was stuck with a funny problem, the drive would not be detected in the PC while it was not ejected, so i opened it and tried to flash it, yeah bad idea, snap crackle, pop and when I opened it again to see what happened, there was a black shard inside the laser lens.. the final blow

Have to say I'm never getting another Pioneer reader, gonna stick to the super-fast-reading-anything-perhaps even make you coffee Lite-Ons... It's too bad that the store I got the liteon from had a badly calibrated batch, my brother's exact same model read my discs with no problems, and it was purchased only a few months prior, from the same location!... after the second drive they refused to give me another so now i'm waiting for a new batch... (in case you're wondering, firmware upgrades made no difference, the media was readible in other drives and two different computers were used in the test, so it wasn't mine )

hi,
i havd compaq dvd-117 that uses the same rpc region free firmware as pioneer dvd-117 firmware.
just checking if i can go through ur link for mine as it's not reading cdrws at all.
thanks

Is this tutorial gonna help me with this problem thingy of mine!? i have a dvd drive, it's an A-OPEN DVD PRO 1640.... Slot type.... i'm using the PIONEER DVD 105S firmware... i've been encoutering problems, problems like when i insert any cd media, it doesn't read the media at all.... it just ejects it.... any advice for me?!

clean your drive. See if it works better. Apply your common sense. Drives do get dirty with time and you have to clean them. You should find a few posts here that tell you how to do that. Use search.

Hello, has anybody has the new link for this tutorial?
Did somebody make a copy that can be posted here or sent it to me privately to jlry##yahoo##com ??

I will really appreciate it

Thank you.

JR

New tutorial location:

http://ca.geocities.com/duren_959@rogers.com/dvd/index.html

i only get an "Whoops! We can't find your page!" page.

-andy-

sorry, I made some last minute changes, it's index.html, or just the /dvd/ should be fine.

http://ca.geocities.com/duren_959@rogers.com/dvd/index.html

The web page you are trying to access doesn't exist on Yahoo! GeoCities.
http://ca.geocities.com/duren_959@roger ... index.html
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Anyone have a copy of hte tutorial kicking around?????