Re: Message for Andre Hedrick

From: Theodore Y. Ts'o (tytso@MIT.EDU)
Date: Mon May 29 2000 - 08:10:11 EST


   From: Tkil <tkil@scrye.com>
   Date: 28 May 2000 19:28:36 -0600

      I purchased a Plextor UltraWide (40x drive with Ultra SCSI
      interface, id string "PX-40TW") a few months ago, and had some
      glitches with it, so I wanted to upgrade its firmware.

      I found Schilly's firmware upgrader, but I could not find the
      binary firmware to upgrade my drive; the ultrawide is not supported
      by Plextor Europe (which does publish raw binaries), and the only
      form of upgrade available from Plextor USA is a windows binary (and
      it's *not* a PKEXE archive, either, sigh.)

This is annoying, but at least you could take the .EXE to a friend's
machine that does run windows, unpack the file, and then extract the raw
binary firmware file.

It gets worse if you have a Plextor IDE drive, which Schilly's firmware
updater apparently doesn't support *at* *all*. So I was forced to
remove and uncable my drive from my Linux box, temporarily cable it up
to my Quicken/TurboTax machine, and do the upgrade on that machine.
Very ugly, and very annoying.....

   ... "but i'm not bitter."

Heh. Unfortunately, Plextor drives are among the best in the business,
where as the rest seem to be interested in the high-volume, low-cost,
low-quality market. That's why it's really surprising to me, given the
other engineering decisions which Plextor has made, that Plextor USA
doesn't want to support the Linux market. Stupid, really, considering
that they've already decided to focus on the high-end of the market.

                                                - Ted

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