Since DVD writers are no longer used as much as they were used 5 to 10 years ago, they get rusty and stop working after a year or so. I must have bought more than ten different CD/DVD writers in my life just to replace the faulty ones. But this time when my old faithful LG DVD writer started to show signs to senile decay, I decided to give it one last go and reflash its firmware to see if it makes any changes. LG’s website is no help – they do not provide any firmware for the model GH22NP1. So I had to dump (extract) the firmware from a friend’s working DVD writer of the same model and then reflash it in my DVD writer. The process worked – and now my DVD writer is working like it used to.
In order to dump the firmware of a LG DVD writer, you need a tool called Devilsclaw Flasher. This tool works only for some LG DVD writers. It is a command line tool, so you should know a little about running command line interface programs. You have to open an elevated command prompt and then give the command flasher -D. This will show you a list of all optical drives in your PC – not down the device ID for your target optical drive. If you have only one optical drive, then this is completely unnecessary as your device ID would be 1.
Then give the command flasher -d 1 -m main_firmware.bin assuming your DVD writer has device ID 1. This will read the data from the DVD writer’s chip memory and dump into a file main_firmware.bin. The process may take more than 10-15 minutes to finish. I almost pressed Ctrl+C to close the program when it suddenly showed the message that process was finished.
Now that you have a firmware dump, you can flash it in the same model of DVD writer. In order to flash it on the target DVD writer, first turn off your computer, connect the target DVD writer that is not working properly, power on your PC and when Windows boots up, open an elevated command prompt to give this command : flasher -d 1 -m main_firmware.bin again assuming that device ID of the target DVD writer is 1.
Your DVD writer will show a blinking LED light as if it is reading a disk only the LED will not blink so fast. When the blinking stops, the flashing is complete. The flasher tool will also show you a message that flashing has finished. Now you should shutdown Windows and power off the PC (unplug the power cord) for a few minutes. When you restart Windows, the DVD write should start working properly once again. If the DVD writer does not work properly then it is the hardware related problem and you might have to buy a new DVD writer.