I finally got my Staples Black Friday I/O Magic drive installed; wouldn't boot until I removed nforce IDE drivers.

Now I'm considering upgrading the firmware. I was lucky at Staples; My drive says BenQ B7C9 on the back. Nero Info tool reports the B7C9 firmware.

From what I've read on this forum I should just flash with a retail firmware such as B7M9. However the BenQ site says if BenQ is not displayed on the face of the burner I should use the G7M9 firmware.

1. I have not found a sticky post with flashing instructions. Is there one?

2. Should I use the retail or bulk firmware? Or a custom firmware?

3. Which version is best? One poster said the P9 (latest) was the worst (I would have assumed it to be the best).

4. Should I flash with the windows tool or in dos?

5. One poster who had problems was asked if he had a disk in the drive when he flashed. I would assume to have no disk in the drive. Does this matter?

Thanks!

You're very lucky to get the B7C9. Just flash directly with B7P9 windows tool (or other Bxxx if you like). B7P9 works excellent for me.

You'll be just fine, the only difference between the drive you got and the retail BenQ is the faceplate that says BenQ for the WHOLE wide world to see when they look at your computer. Jsut think how much extre they would hav charged you for that faceplate if you werent such a smart (or is it lucky?) shopper.

I just bought a Nutech ddw-163. On the label it says G7H9 (Benq OEM). Can anyone confirm that I can just flash to Benq retail firmware with WinDWflash and the appropiate firmware(.bin or .cvt?)

Thanks

I read some bad stuff in the forum about the B7P9.

I had B7P9 but went straight back to B7M9. With B7P9 10-13 coasters (B7M9 100-150 burns without a coaster!!!). The hell with 4xdl and back to the super burnquality of B7M9.

Where these problems with B7P9 related to DL burning only, or did you also have problems with SL burning ?
Where your burns off bad quality or did you get errors during the burning ..?

I have B7P9 installed and have not noticed any problems with SL burning : about 15 discs burned.
I must admit I didn't try DL burning yet as the media are still too expensive
Do you notice a difference in quality as far as SL burning is concerned between B7M9 and B7P9 ??
-
Pat357

@Pat357: I haven't burned dl because discs are to expensive. With B7P9 had few burns stopt because of errors and about 10 disc were unreadable in my standalone dvd-player. But a few minutes ago i got an email from a friend who tells me to flash it again with B7P9 cause he thinks something went wrong during first flash. He has B7P9 and says has absolute perfect burns on sl.

Hmmm. I doubt I'm going to pay the current price for DL media anyway. Still it would be nice to have this settled. Perhaps an opinion poll is needed regarding reliability and speed.

This is just my belief:

There is only so much room to write the firmware, so when they add new things like 4xDL or specifics for new media they have to drop some older ones. So sometimes you will find some older versions will work better for some media. Eventually you will buy newer media and end up going to the latest firmware.

And don't forget hardware compatability. I bought this burner on Friday, spent all day Saturday trying to get my system to boot with it. Finally got rid of the nforce IDE drivers and fixed the problem. An hour ago I downloaded and flashed the B7M9 firmware. I noticed in the version notes that it fixes the problem with the nforce IDE drivers. WTF- LOL!

I'm pretty happy now. Info Tool reports my drive read and write at 40x now instead of 8x. I still want to know if I should go to the P firmware.

I've flashed my drive back and forth a few times.........you can go back if you want to. the flash gui will tell you its older but you can go ahead and do it. as in have B7P9 and flash back to B7M9 or B7K9 etc........

Does anyone know what the "P" firmware fixes or adds?

4x Dual Layer support on certain media and some minor changes in error control which seems to cause slight slowdown in burning speeds.