I downloaded firmware for my Samsung SD-616Q F400(RPC-2) I used the exe with bin file and its now Samsung SD-616Q E400 (RPC-1) I flashed the drive restarted ran driveinfo.exe and it said region free (pic) yet I tested it out put a R1 dvd in, it asked for region, I then put a R2 DVD in and it also asked for the region and it said I had 2 chances left to change the region. How come this is?? I thought RPC-1 Drivers are suppose to make a drive region free.

WinXP has it's own software counter for the number of zone change that left.

The diff between a RPC1 and RPC2 firmware is that this software counter is doubled by a hardware sounter that is in the burner itself. When this counter reach 5, the last value is frozen forever.

But the winXP counter can be reseted by tools like "Genie" or "RegionFree".

my my is there anything u don't know dialhot

well thanx for gettin back to me I'll have a look round for one of them progs hopefully one supports my dvd-rom.

Well I am about 2 months late but if you still need some help, here it is

The problem is the DVD player software which has its own counter. You may wish to get AnyDVD from http://www.slysoft.com/en/ or DVDRegionFree from http://www.dvdidle.com. You dont even need to flash your DVD-ROM drive, you may use your original RPC-2 firmware when you use these programs and all DVD-ROM drives are supported ! but unfortunately they are not freeware

Also if you wish, there is a WinDVD tweaker around which resets the region counter...

well I know have a new PC I now have HP DVD Writer 300n 3.10 I found firmware for it but its DOS based and I didn't have a clue what I was doing anyone know of a GUI for this DVD Writer drive?

Get MtkWinFlash from http://digi.rpc1.org/mwf.htm It's usage is pretty straightforward, and it can recover most drives even if the flashing fails. You have to use the bin or hex files from your DOS based firmware set.

well found the firmware again for me drive and it comes in a zip file with a .bat file and 3 exe files, any suggestions??

Is this a selfextracting exe file? In order to determine that install WinRAR http://www.rarlabs.com After installing it, right-click on the executable and open the archive with WinRAR. Extract the bin or hex file and then run MtkWinFlash. If the exe does not include a bin or hex file, you have to create a bootdisk and run the flash program in DOS.

well it seems its all dos based and I haven't a clue how to use it

All you have to do is surely to laucnh the bat !

It's a text file, you can copy it here if you don't know anything in DOS command.

well I'm confused I used driveinfo and it said:



so them I done start --> run then cmd went to the dir of the firmware update and it then said:



so I'm all at the min

Since there's a file called autoexec.bat, I'm guessing it should be run from a DOS boot disk instead of the WinXP command line (that's probably why it's not finding your drive, Windows doesn't like programs accessing the hardware directly).

I'm not sure how you make a boot disk in WinXP (or even if you can), but you might want to take a look at http://www.bootdisk.com/...

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Chris "Bob" Odorjan

sorry to be dumb but I'm lookin at that site with a blank look on me face lol that site looses me

Best thing to do would be to download one of the DOS bootdisks from bootdisk.com (the Win98SE OEM one should work) and run it from Windows (you'll need to stick a blank formatted floppy in your floppy drive). Then unzip the firmware to another blank formatted floppy (only because I'm not sure if it will fit on the boot disk). Then reboot the computer with the first disk in the drive, it will probably ask if you want CD-ROM support, but it doesn't matter what you put (the drive flasher will find it anyway), and eventually will give you a DOS prompt. Take the first disk out and put the second one in, and type the following:

That should start the program to flash the drive.

(Don't worry about viruses and such from bootdisk.com, I've been using them for a couple of years without problems.)

You might want to wait a bit for someone else here to verify/correct my steps... I haven't flashed a drive in a while, so my memory's a little foggy...

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Chris "Bob" Odorjan

I think I;ll wait for a verifier lol I'm not to keen on stuff like this meself lol