Lite-ON LTD-165H - Testing Different Firmware

Now in HTML format - no more non-word-wrapped text flying off the screen in Firefox! - this is an old documentation from 2005 (or 2006? I forget) of my attempts to improve the GD-ROM reading performance of the aforementioned Lite-ON DVD-ROM drive. Sadly, it all came to nothing, but this painstakingly-boring stuff has to be done at least once, doesn't it? :P

Note: With regards to the trap disc not working sometimes - this is sadly an inherent problem with the drive. Sometimes it works first time, sometimes it doesn't and I try running a laser lens cleaner disc through it, which often works, but sometimes doesn't, in which case I just try it over and over again. It is quite annoying to say the least.

Tested Firmware Revisions:

Note: When I say "only 89% of ChuChu Rocket can be extracted", I mean this in the sense that no errors occured. You can, of course, extract all the way to 100% but only once you hit the 89% mark in CDRWIN, and only if you set the "Error Recovery" option to "Ignore" or "Replace", both of which fill in the unreadable data with... more unreadable data. This is, however, a necessity if you want to know the exact capacity of the CCR disc's data sector.

Which brings me to another point; in his guide, Yursoft says you should extract data + audio at 4x, but does not say that you can't extract at higher speeds. Notably, my LITE-ON drive can extract perfectly well at 16x (the highest selectable speed in CDRWIN). So, don't be afraid to experiment with faster extraction speeds.

Lastly, for reference, here's a few snippets from the CDRWIN help file explaining what each Error Recovery option does:

(Sometimes the above can occur even with a perfectly good disc - if you get this option, just try extracting again. If it comes up more than about 5 times, then your drive is probably not capable of extracting it fully, at least not without trying out a new firmware. And maybe not even after that.)


Copyright Information

Unless otherwise stated, all of this information was written by myself (RobbyW / STC-Fan / zedeckseightyone) ©2004-2008 or adapted from sources who have helpfully contributed information to this document. You may NOT use any information from this document unless you ask nicely beforehand, or something like that.