No luck on that power management change in the BIOS. I made the change on four of our 170L machines here on friday, and none of the drives are recognozed this morning.

Tom

Would be nice if someone from Dell would at least acknowledge that there is a problem. What are the chances of all of us having the same problem? When I called Dell Tech support they were baffled and said that they had never heard of anything like this. Can we get someone from dell to reply in the thread saying that they are either working on it or that they at least know there is a problem?

 

This may just be me. but I have also noticed that I am running a Microsoft USB Optical mouse and the cursor hangs from time to time like it loses contact with the mouse. I have to unplug and replug in the usb mouse for the cursor to come back... May just be me.

Hi guys,

the drives have been changed, but they sent us the Samsung-Drives a second time!
I am tired of DELL :(
I hope, that DELL has some medicine against this issue, but I mean they don`t.

Greetings from hot Germany

TinyRK

Message Edited by TinyRK on 06-07-2004 08:08 AM

Boy, you got that right. We're finding the same thing...support people wanting us to go through diagnostics that I KNOW have nothing to do with this.

Our biggest dillema is that we bought systems with no OS and installed Linux on them, so we're probably in a world of it. We'll probably have to install Windows on a few of these machines and wait for the drives to vanish just to get support. sheeesh...

Reading from a CD is one of the most generic things a PC can do. It's not like there are driver issues or anything. These things just seem to be whacking out the IDE bus simply as a result of the OS monitoring the drive.

I was going to buy a 4600 for a friend, but I'm not going to unless there's a fix for this or I can be sure I won't get one of these SW-252S drives.

Tom

Message Edited by tdexter on 06-07-2004 10:38 AM

That's too bad it didn't work. I have had this fix work on 10 systems with a samsung cdrw part number M1198

Message Edited by jjbuckaroo on 06-07-2004 02:30 PM

oh, and tom, did you turn the drive back on in bios? If it dissappeared and rebooted with them powered down, the bios would turn them off again permanently.

You've lost me a little here...The CDs in these machines still show up in the BIOS just fine, and none of them ever got disabled in the BIOS as a result of failing. As a matter of fact, rebooting always fixes it, albeit temporary.

I think the issue you had may have been different from what I'm seeing here, and I don't think these drives are getting powered down. They just seem to whack out the IDE bus and become inaccessable, and cannot be ejected with soft commands or with the eject button.

I've now seen this happen as soon as 15 minutes after rebooting the machine, so it's doubtful that it's related to power managment.

Thanks for giving me something to try though!

Tom

ah, that is different. I had the problem where they would just power themselves off. Couldn't eject them or anything.

Just add another company having the same problem. Has anyone found a fix for this yet?

 

 

Not as far as I've heard. My company installed Windows 2000 on a few of these just as a test (we're running Linux on the rest). We're having problems with these drives on the Windows machine as well. The OS thinks the device was ejected and it disappears from the device manager.

I saw that the forum administrators have posted a thread on the Precision CD/DVD forum asking users to report specifics of similar issues with Samsung CDs on those models, and asked users for system specicifics to help them find the cause. I've seen nothing of the sort here.

As I've posted on another thread, even the newest SW-252S firmware from Samsung (R951, which has to be force installed using their DOS utility, and which voids your Dell warantee) doesn't correct the problem.

Tom

Hey all.. Just got off the phone with L2 Dell Support. They think that this might resolve the Issue.

Search for R902.zip

My Firmware was 901 and this is version 902.

Ill test it and lets see how it works.

http://support.dell.com/filelib/format.aspx?releaseid=r79594

Release Title:Removable Storage: Samsung SW-252S HH 48X32 CD-RW, Firmware, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Multi Language, Multi System, v.R902 (Windows), A01

Fixes and Enhancements:This firmware resolves a drive detection issue where the drive eventually becomes non-functional.

Thanks a million for the update David!

And for those who may not be running Windows, I was able to install the R902DEL.BIN firmware that's contained in that zip file by copying it to a bootable dos floppy along with Samsungs dos installer:

http://www.samsungodd.com/KorLib/File/sfdndos.exe

...and after booting from the floppy entering:

sfdndos r902del.bin

I installed the firmware on five of out 170L machines and made sure the drives operated correctly and could burn CDs etc. We'll see how they do after they stay running for a while.

Thanks again David, and thanks Dell for the update!

One thing that does confuse me about the whole issue however...Are the Dell OEM versions of the Samsung SW-252S actually different drives than a standard Samsung SW-252S, or is this custom firmware just needed to work correctly with these specific motherboards?? Seems a bit odd.

Tom

TDexter, I installed the update this morning and so far so good. I will post again tomorrow if all is well.