wine users - Aug 2006 - Success story: updating LG DVD firmware using Wine

Hello,

I have an LG GSA-4163B drive. Recently I had many problems with the drive
not recognizing correct writing speed, and locking up hard on many DVD-RW
media. When I bought the drive, the latest firmware was at version A100,
and it was available bundled with a DOS flasher. Unfortunately LG dropped
DOS support, and now all the firmware updates are Windows only.

As the drive was barely usable anyway, I decided to risk and try to run the
updater on Wine.

I downloaded an official internet updater from LG site, named
LGODD_AutoFW2.exe. At first it didn't wanted to install. I discovered it
tries to write to non-existant C:\Windows\TEMP directory, and completely
ignores my TEMP environment variable pointing to /tmp. I created this
directory, and installation went fine. Unfortunately, this updater refused
to work. It is written in Visual Basic, and it seems to have many problems
with Wine's OLE. All it does is display a small empty window, with a
context menu that only allows the user to open LG site in a browser.

I went looking for another firmware updater, and I found this:
http://lgodd.lge.com/fwdrv/DVD-WRITER/GSA4163A106.exe

It failed to run at first, because of missing MFC42.DLL, so I downloaded
VisualC redistributables (vcredist.exe) from MS and installed it. The
updater launched, but it could not find my drive. I tried again, this time
with a mounted CD inside, and the drive was found! Unfortunately, the
update itself does not work with CD inside, and wine locked the drive - I
could unmount it, but I couldn't eject the CD. So, before the next try I
disabled drive locking, and the update went fine!

To sum it up, the whole process step-by-step:

- wine vcredist.exe
- echo 0 >/proc/sys/dev/cdrom/lock
- insert a cd and mount it
- wine GSA4163A106.exe
- umount and eject cd
- press the update button

My wine version is 0.9.18, kernel 2.6.16.4. Don't blame me if you turn your
drive into a paper weight trying the same stunt. It is perfectly possible
that the updater does not work reliably on wine, and I was just incredibly
lucky to not destroy my drive.