DVD Drive Problem

[dcommand3r]

Current Beta: x64 Build 7000
Hardware: HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-T50N

Laptop Model: Asus F8VA-B1

Symptoms:
-Some CD/DVDs will lock up the drive and keep spinning (eject will not work)
-Whatever action i was doing from that CD/DVD (installing, copying, etc) will be seen as "not responding" but i can't use task manager to shut down the process
-Sometimes it will stop the process (after a long time waiting), but my Drive disappears from Device Manager + My Computer
-This occurs in both of the most recent builds for x64 and x86
-This drive worked PERFECTLY in Windows Vista and Windows XP
-Can't find much driver support for this drive

Examples:
-I install Warcraft 3 Reign of Chaos perfectly. Eject disc and put in Frozen Throne. Click Install...install window pops up and just hangs there while the disc spins loudly....can't eject and can't end process
-Installed Microsoft Office 2007 perfectly, but left it in the drive to play Wii...came back and it was spinning loudly and was not able to be ejected.
-Tried to copy files from disc to hard drive and files did not transfer.


Has anybody experienced this? and if so, how'd you find a workaround.

 

[Mark]

Are you sure the drive is still OK? Have you tested it again in another OS?

 

[dcommand3r]

Yes, the drive worked perfectly before installing Windows 7 (i was using Vista Ultimate 64 bit). To make sure, I just created another partition and installed Vista on it and it worked fine.

 

[csar55]

Are you really sure the drive works in XP and Vista?

I own an Asus B50A laptop with a builtin HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-T50N drive.
It was quite hard but the problem can be seen in XP. In Vista x64 it was no problem at all to reproduce this issue.

It looks like this is actually a firmware problem of this drive. My drive has firmware revision RR04.

Please see this linux-ide thread:

'2.6.28: Timeout problem with AHCI SATA DVD drive' - MARC

Several Ubuntu Linux users also complain about this issue:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/289261
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/309384

 

[wizen]

It would seem to be an issue with the firmware of the drive. I took a chance and flashed the drive's firmware, with excellent results - no more freezing, constant spinning up, non-recognition of the drive. It works.

The firmware can be found attached to this post, here, or if you don't trust me or firmwarehq.com you can find the file by googling GSA-T50N_RR07.zip or GSA-T50N RR07.

I sincerely hope this helps.

Edit: Ha, necropost on my first post. Sorry, mods.