Firmware Updates

[Shimada_Kanbei]

Hi guys this question is related to my "accused" CD/DVD burner the LG GSA 4176B, well I've gone to the site and downloaded a recent update. In the instruction it says that no background program even anti-virus and drive should be in the master. Can it be dangerous to just update it without the need to exchange the drive to be a master? My secondary IDE has my DVD ROM as the master and rewriter the slave. Besides if  the case that everytime I update the firmware I must exchange it to be the master, tends to be tedious. Oh and I did not update the drive yet for safety. Thanks 8-) :-?

[patio]

Why are you flasihng the drive ? ?

Be specific.

[Shimada_Kanbei]

Well it might help too in resolving the error in the drive having a burn with bad areas. My drive has a DL12 firmware and the latest now DL13, maybe if I update the firmware I hope that burn outputs will no longer have a bad area (unreadable portion of the burn) just like when it was new. But can I flash the drive even on it's slave state as opposed to the instruction? Coz it's tedious to dismantle the box everytime it has a flash update well this applies to all I/O devices that can be mounted and unmounted, but if only the drive has no burn errors I will not flash it as flashing is known to be dangerous if done wrong.

[soybean]

If the manufacturer says you should configure the drive as master when doing a firmware update, don't you think you'd better do it?  I would agree it seems odd that that is necessary but I don't think I'd try to dispute the need to do it if the manufacturer says do it that way.

Besides, how often do you really need to update firmware for an optical drive?  Many of them are probably never updated; it's rarely necessary.  

[Shimada_Kanbei]

Yeah sir soybean very weird and I agree very tedious. But I'm trying all optons before blaming the drive itself like sir street1 says maybe a ribbon cable or an update but if all else fails then the drive is really at fault. Ok I'll update it as Master, I'm just worry because I can stop all program but my antivirus because even it is off it still show messages. I'am using Kaspersky(hope I can mention programs here) and even with it off and not on system try it engages the computer. How do I turn off all process in the background so that I can flash safely? Can I flash I/O like this drive in SafeMode? Thanks.

[soybean]

I'm not familiar with Kaspersky but I'd think it can surely be disabled in the software. But, if you can't figure out how to do that, you could try killing it in Task Manager.  Hit Ctrl/Alt/Del to open Task Manager, select it and then click on End Process.  Another technique for disabling it would be to run msconfig (Start, Run, and enter msconfig in the Run box), select the Startup tab, find Kaspersky and uncheck the box next it.  Click Apply, and OK.  This will stop Kaspersky from launching during startup. Of course, you should reverse this, once you have updated your firmware.

And, yes, you could update firmware in Safe Mode.

[Shimada_Kanbei]

Thank you sir soybean for the info and also the guys who chipped in you are all very helpfull thanks again.     8-)

[Raptor]

I'd just turn it in where you bought it and get a new one, if that doesn't solve it, you can always update the firmware later on... Chances are that when you're getting errors while burning that the drive is defect rather than required to have its firmware updated.. But then again, I never flashed a CD/DVD-ROM Drive...