Windows 7 - Overcoming an incorrect firmware.

My next door neighbor, who thinks he's savvy, thought he was updating his cd drives' firmware. It was rendered useless.

I get a phone call-----HELP!

Oh well, I used to be in the business, I'll give it a shot for him.

He says he acquired a cd burner from a Dell pc; a Dimension ???? built around 2003.
The Dell drive info: HLDS model GCE-8481B (manu'd by Hitachi-LG).

Mr. Brilliant went to firmware hq and downloaded the latest LG firmware 105 for GCE-8481B and flashed it. You just can't do that with Dell stuff. Being curious, I went to the site and downloaded it, unzipped it and read the readme. Guess what, it said do not flash OEM drives from HP, IBM, Compaq, & Dell. How does one miss that? Because it wasn't in capital letters and bold?

I scoured Dell's support pages and their ftp site, and couldn't find the original firmware that the drive had --C102 (It's marked on the info label).

I was hoping to reflash the drive and bring it back to life.
I know it's a legacy cd drive, but he's a friend. Any shot at finding this firmware and helping this guy? I think he's trying to save face at home.

Finding the firmware might be a toughie. I had a bad flash on an optical drive which actually rendered the whole system unbootable; Windows knew there was something there but due to the bad flash couldn't quite figure out what it was. That was solved by hot plugging the device after Windows had booted and running the flash utility as usual.

As for getting the correct firmware from Dell...

Added:

I didn't want to just give up on a sour note. See if this works:

HLDS GCE-8481B 48X CD-R/RW Drive Firmware Update - HP Customer Care (United States - English)

It's from HP, but may be worth a shot. You might also tell your friend that he could stuff a DVD Burner in there for less than twenty bucks:

Newegg.com - CD Burners, DVD Burners

Sensational suggestion!

I downloaded the HP firmware, but could not reflash in Windows (because the ID would have been wrong); which is what that file does. Also, with the affected drive attached, the BIOS won't hand off to the OS -- no boot. But we have tricks, don't we?!!!

I extracted the .hex (new flash) file from the download with Universal Extracter.

I borrowed Dell's DOS flash utility JE4 (which burns Dell's hex files), and copied it to a good floppy (I still have some), along with the new firmware. Now, with JE4, you can FORCE a flash by telling the utility what "port" to work on. In my case, it was secondary master which is port 3.

So, the command at "A" prompt would be: je4 je6hp104.hex 3 /m (this is a boot mode switch).

Powered up with an ME boot disk and the drive unplugged (remember, the BIOS post stalls). Hot-plugged the bad drive, and replaced the boot floppy with the one that had the flasher and new hex file. Typed in the above command, and VOILA, the cd drive was restored to usefulness.

Everyone wins with this one: profdlp, accolades for getting the ball rolling; my neighbor, receiving a valuable lesson; and all of us, by learning how to convert a windows-flashed firmware to DOS. There are many times that's the only way to do it.

Thanks to this wonderful forum.

A most unusual way to skin the cat - glad you got it!