SOLVED Need some help flashing DVD drive firmware

[IgnitedX]

So I'm workingwith this DVD drive here -> http://ncix.com/products/?sku=49597

Anyways, long story short... I have read that the drive I have shown is just a rebranded LiteOn iHAS124. With the LiteOn drives, there is this utility that allows you to set the drive to "region free" so you can play dvd's from any region...

the problem is that the utility wouldn't recognize my drive as it has Asus firmware on it.... SOOO any idea on how I can force flash the drive?

I can't get around the region problem by ripping the dvd's first because this is for my dad's computer and he's not too literate with computers. So the only other solution that I have is to stick in ANOTHER drive (which I don't want to do) and have one set to american region and the other to asian region...



any help is appreciated!

 

[larrymoencurly]

You may want to check or ask about this at Club.MyCE.com, where there's a lot of talk about optical drives, including cross flashing them (check the stickies). BTW, when they say "PLDS", they mean Liteon, as it stands for "Philips-Liteon Digital Storage".

Do the forums at Asus have anything about the region-free utility?

CodeCodeGuys.RPC1.org may have something, including stuff that can brick your drive if not used right. To cross flash my Memorex MX-550 to a LiteOn iHAS224A, I think I used their EEPROM_utility, then ran the regular LiteOn firmware flash (reverse from the normal order), both downloadable from that site. But OmniPatcher doesn't work, and do NOT flash the boot block or the "media learn". Also some LiteOn models have more than one version.

 

[IgnitedX]

You may want to check or ask about this at Club.MyCE.com, where there's a lot of talk about optical drives, including cross flashing them (check the stickies). BTW, when they say "PLDS", they mean Liteon, as it stands for "Philips-Liteon Digital Storage".

Thank you very much for that link to their forum. From there, I located this post -> http://club.myce.com/f87/something-...09-2010-newegg-317360/index3.html#post2576703 which completely solved my problem. Cheers!