[weblacky]

Hi All,
I know I've been silent for a while. I'm hoping that changes soon but in the meantime I have a small little tidbit that you all may be interested in.

I've been using an old Plextor TX-40TSi SCSI CDROM Drive with Irix and it's been working super for loading the OS (fastest CDROM access).  I recently ran across another Plextor drive when rummaging through my local PC recycler.  Now these have been getting extremely rare for the past 10 to 15 years or so...so it was certainly surprise to run across this drive.   The drive is a Plextor PX-W4012TS (PLexWriter) CDROM drive.

Of course most people don't even know what these are anymore so I was able to get the drive super cheap and ran out the door.  But the big concern is of course does this drive even work or does it need any type of repair?

Well I found out something very interesting about this new drive in that there is actually a built-in, hardware, test routine described in the manual that allows you to test drive with just power hooked up, freestanding, with no computer software or SCSI cable required.  It seems this routine was designed to check all the workings of the drive after it had been in transit/shipping without requiring a computer.

Now of course the instructions are in the manual but I'm going to add my own information because the manual wasn't really explicit enough in the way it said things.  So getting this setup was a little bit of a pain.   

I will say that, long story short, the drive fully passed its hardware READ/WRITE CD-R diagnostic with no errors indicated!


If you have a Plextor drive that has a "test" jumper option then you have a hardware test routine available to you.  While I can't promise that all Plextor drives operate this way, I can at least describe the way this drive operates and maybe yours operates the same.

The manual says that by default the parity jumper is set on the drive (leave that on all the time).  When attempting to activate test mode the jumpers need to be set as the following:

ID=3
Parity=ON
Term=OFF
Test=ON
Block=ON

Make sure you have removed your SCSI ribbon cable from the drive.

Now for the part that the manual literally implied but I still had trouble with was:  You must hold down the drive's eject button as you supply it with power.  You'll know you've done this correctly because two of the four LEDs on the face of the drive will start to flash alternately.  You can then press the eject button again and put in a blank CD-R disc and press the eject button again to retract the tray and begin testing.

There are several small notes about errors being indicated through the flashing of various LEDs on the face. The only ones you need to know are if the disc LED flashes multiple times then it believes that the media is unrecognizable or isn't blank.  And under normal circumstances the two rightmost LEDs should alternately flash during testing and if testing is successful the disc tray is automatically ejected. If the disc is not automatically ejected then some error condition is expressed using the LEDs. But to be fair all the error conditions expressed are catastrophic.

The test takes approximately nine minutes according to the manual, and since the blank CD-R is actually written to it is considered used up by the test and you throw it away afterwards.  So this is a pretty cool feature I've never seen before. This allows somebody to just sacrifice one blank piece of media and gain peace of mind that their CD writer actually works!


One more thing I'll also say is I'm a big believer in trying to get the last drive firmware, when it comes to optical drives, put out by a manufacturer. In this case I was able to use wayback machine to grab the old firmware for this drive from Plextor's site archive.  My CD writer was made in 2004 which indicated it probably had the second to the last firmware. Which turned out to be correct.

Because of such a late production I knew that Windows XP would work just fine for this upgrade process.  I will say though I'm not totally familiar with or comfortable with these old drives using a host operating system for firmware updates. I'm used to burning a binary file onto a cd and placing it in the drive and having to drive auto upgrade on its own. Apparently Plextors don't do that, and yet they have a hardware based test routine, go figure.

I use the software under Windows XP to upgrade my drive's firmware before I took it through the hardware test. So now I have a fully working CD writer that has been hardware tested on the last firmware released for it in 2006.  Who says miracles don't happen every day :- )


Cheers!