flashing optical drives

[Dharamsi]

Hello guys.

I have a question here.Do we have any of these dvd-rw drives that you can that are external?and why we are flashing the optical drives.I need more explanation in this regard.The reason is I own a shuttle and want to be able to keep my cdrom drive installed

any thoughts
thanks..!!

[Rawko]

Once an optical drive is designed, the drive vendor may add new features to the drive, such as Mount Rainier compatibility and additional media compatibility. At this time, they will release a new version of the drive firmware,along with a short explanation of what the new firmware will do. If this explanation seems to be solving a issue you are experiencing,Now a flashing with this firmware will do.Also, in a few cases, most famously with Lite-On, you can flash your drive to a higher maximum write speed.i seriously think you should look at internal dvd burners, they are cheaper and they act like a cd-rom also, so its not like you are losing your cd-rom. you will be able to read and write CD's and DVD's

[Killen]

Whenever the drive vendor updates the firmware for a particular drive, they release a self-executable file,along with a short description of the updates this gives. Then, if these updates are said to resolve any problems you might be having, you should download the flasher, execute it in Windows, and reboot the computer.Anyways, flashing in Windows can sometimes lead to errors, due to the fact that at any given time, there will be a multitude of other processes in the background, which may cause an error during the flash. This can lead to your drive being trashed. While this is an absolute worst case scenario, it has been known to occur

[Hardwareman]

You know what LtnFlash allows customers of Lite-ON made optical drives backup or flash their firmware right from Windows. It is the first tool which is capable of making firmware backups from Windows. It is also the only method to make backups of the firmwares in external Lite-ON drives. It is not a entire replacement for mtkflash though since LtnFlash doesn't work for drives that weren't made by Lite-ON. Since version 1.1.0, LtnFlash is also able to Enable/Disable/Reset the region counter on Lite-ON DVD Drives.