Firmware problem for tsst H493a drive, which will not recognize disks

This tsst (Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology) H493a drive came with the new Dell E520 a little over a year ago, and although it will play burned CD's and commercial DVD's, it will not recognize blank DVD's, such as made by Ritek or Maxell, which my external Pioneer 111L would. This failure occures under XP and Vista, as i dual boot.

I have downloaded the only firmware i can find (from Lenovo) which is spsd to fix that problem, but running the file results in the SFDWIN flash utility saying (after clicking on the autorun.bin file in the Temp folder it points to) that the flash is not compatible with this drive. No external drive is connected at the time.

I have searched and found another user who had this problem on Dell foruims, and Dell gave them a new drive. I never pushed for that as i had my external Pioneer, but that quit on me, so here i am am. Thanks for any advice.