I just bought what I thought was an LG burner and now find out that it is listed as Hitachi/LG on the Clone website. Hmmm?
The burner was manufactured in March 2002 with fw 1.07.

In the hardware manager it's shown as follows:
HL-DT-ST CD-RW GCE-8240B.

I just noticed that LG are not in that string of letters and numbers. Does this mean that it is now Hitachi?

I think hitachi ang LG have joined into one company.

Their drives is identified as HL-DT-ST

I don't think you need to worry

I was alarmed because I once purchased a Creative 8/4/32 burner because I thought it was a rebadged Plextor. Since I was new to burners then it was not until 3 months later after reading posts in forums that I picked up on the fact that Creative were rebadging 4-5 different burners as the same model! So what I thought was a Plextor was in fact a Samsung SW208B. Fortunately I found a hacked firmware flasher that allowed me to reflash it so i could use CloneCD so all was not lost.
I just thought I was in for the same thing again with the LG burner.

Most companies that produce CD-RW drives do this. Liteon sells there drive to other companies. I think Cendyne and Cyberdrive have rebadged drives from Liteon.

And most of the same companies buy there cd motors and mechanisms from 4 or 5 different manufacturers.(Matsushita,
which owns Panasonic and Tandy Corp.), Samsung, and I cant remember the other companies.

Pacific Digital and Hi-Val do this also. What I have starting doing when I purchase another burner, I ask the sales person to let me see the drive and look at the drive on the top and the front plate. I actaully turned one down because he told me it was made by Liteon but, it was actually sold by phillips.