The Firmware Page

Dear RPC1 Members,
I am in the market to upgrade the Optical drive on my Toshiba Tecra M3 to a DVD Burner, however it appears that those thieves over at Toshiba have put a lock in the BIOS that causes the Optical drive not to be recognized if it's anything other than Master (like Cable Select, which is how most aftermarket Slim drives are configured). That way most customers will get the Optical drive upgrade from them for ~$250, which is ridiculous.

I was looking at a couple of Models on NewEgg between $50-70 but there seems not to be a way to find out whether they are Master/Slave/CS from factory, and the customer support representatives have no idea.

I read somewhere online that your firmwares can also change a drive's setting to Master. Is that correct? I am at a point where I'm willing to buy any drive for which you guys have made a firmware that sets it as a Master.

I would immensely appreciate if one of you experts could tell me if it's true that some of your firmwares set the drive to Master, and if yes for which drivers do you have these firmwares available, so I can look them up online and pick one. If you don't know about existing firmwares that accomplish that, could you perhaps tell me of a drive whose firmware can be modified to do the same thing? I could buy that drive and request such firmware...

Thank you in advance for your help!

-Walter

Hi Walter and welcome to RPC1,

its depending on the drive....
Its possible to switch every drive to master!

Backfire

Backfire, thank you for the reply!

I am currently looking at this guy, is there a firmware that converts it to master already? Should I go ahead and order it?

...or is there a particular drive you recommend me to buy that already has a good firmware for it?

I already bought the Slim-Drive to IDE adapter for Firmware update, all I need is a good drive and the right firmware.

Thank you again!

-Walter

That drive seems to be very new, not even listed on Liteons site.

Chef, at this point I am less concerned about how new a drive is, I am just concerned about buying a good, reliable model that either comes as Master or is "flasheable" as Master (I checked my Laptop with Nero Toolkit and it is, indeed, set as Master).

Is there any model you guys can recommend me? Please let me know at your earliest convenience because I need to buy it and I would like to receive it before I leave town in a few days.

Thank you again for your help!

-Walter

You can switch every slimline drive to master with this workaround

Backfire, thanks for the reply. That is a pretty hardcore mod to do on a brand new drive, is it 100% certain that such mod will make the drive Master? Is there a more detailed article/how-to from where that picture was taken? I am willing to try it if I can't find any firmware, however of course I would prefer to buy a drive you guys recommend me and flash it instead.

Thank you for the answers, please keep them coming!

-Walter

Ok, go for a NEC AD-7543A

The following site contains information how to switch the drive to master
http://www.de.nec.de/faq_detail.php/id/ ... 8/lang/ENG

I hope this is what you

Backfire, I surely do appreciate your help!

I have 2 small problems:

1- I can't seem to find that drive offered in the USA. I'll have to do some more digging, but doesn't look like it is offered here.
2- It appears that the utility to convert it to Master only works with Windows. I am running FreeBSD, so that's not a good solution. I'll read the document again to make sure I understand it fully...

Thank you,

-Walter

...anyone? Is there a burner that comes Master from factory and/or is Flasheable to obtain such result? If all else fails I'll have to try the solder trick suggested by Backfire, however it would be nice if I could avoid that procedure on a brand new drive...

Thanks!

-Walter

Instead of the 7543, you could go for the 7540 drive. It's the same hardware and only lacks Labelflash support.

Don't you have a friend with a Windows laptop that you could ask for changing the drive's IDE mode?

Hey Liggy,
Thanks for the reply.

As I mentioned I needed to read the NEC link better because my initial interpretation was that the drive required a Windows-based daemon running at all times to make it look like a Master. Since it looks like that isn't the case, I do have Windows boxes and I can flash it no problem, I even have the SlimCD-IDE converter ready.

I must have misunderstood. At this point all I need is to look for a retailer that sells either of the two above models. I'll start looking now, in the mean time, what do you think of this model that NewEgg offers?

Thanks!

-Walter

The NEC AD-5540A would be a good choice too...

I couldn't really recognise the exact model from the picture shown, but if it really is a 5540, it should be fine too. Same hardware again, but it neither supports DVD-RAM nor Labelflash. While two of my drives support both, I don't really need either function.

I can

_________________
They say when you play a Microsoft CD backwards you can hear satanic messages... but that's nothing, if you play it forward it will install Windows!

I haven't been on their site before, so I probably didn't notice the the details.

The 7540 is not newer than the 5540 - their hardware is the same. NEC/Optiarc just may have released the drives at different times. If you need DVD-RAM then you should spend 10 bucks more, if you don't you can just safe this money.

Liggy, those are great news to read because the places online where I had found the 7540 were not too trustworthy in my opinion. NewEgg has always been great so after reading your last comment I went ahead and purchased it!

Thanks for the help guys.

Regards,

-Walter

Hey Walter,

please let us know if it works for you (or not).

Absolutely, I will surely come back and post my results in here, hopefully it will benefit future Forum members. Also, I had the Drive sent to the location where I will be traveling to since I wasn't sure I'd have received it on time, so I'll get my hands on it on March 4th. If I don't post results until then don't think I have forgotten about it.

Thank you again,

-Walter

I did follow the workaround to make the TSL532A slim drive (made by toshiba-samsung) master. Joining 47 and 49 terminals is not that hard if you have soldered before. The trick works. Good Luck.[/img][/url]

Gentlemen,
My apologies for the delay but work has been keeping me quite busy. Anyways, I did receive the AD-5540A from NewEgg and proceeded to install it. My trusty Tecra M3 gave me the infamous IDE error during POST, and sure enough the drive would not be detected (I have a WinXP partition). Only if I were to remove it and plug it back in while running Windoze it would be picked up. Anyways, I proceeded to read the very useful page by Liggy and Dee and tried applying the "Normal ATA (master)" patch, since my logical interpretation was that it would have converted my drive to Master. I wound up rebooting the machine, and to my disappointment I had the same POST Error message! Booted into Windoze, ran the Nero Tool and sure enough the drive was still Slave. I thought I might have interpreted the links wrong, so I tried again by downloading the "Reverse ATA (slave)" patch, and this time it worked perfectly. On a side note, since it is stated that my drive has the same exact hardware as the 7540, I did try flashing it with that firmware to see if I could convert it to the better model, but the flashing tool performed a model check and refused to continue. Oh well.

It is great to have a DVD-Burner on my Tecra M3 without having had to shell out $200-300 to those thieves over at Toshiba, thanks again for all your help guys!!!

Best Regards,

-Walter

Happy ending, so it seems.

Newer NEC (Optiarc) models have also a bootcode check to prevent crossflashing.