hey!
my problem is rather peculier…
earlier this year when updating the firmware on my combo-drive my system just hung and upon restarting it i noticed that my combo drive had gone dead. the eject button did not work, the drive was not detected in the bios and even the little green lcd light was gone! i tried everything but could not recover it, then i came across someone who also had the same drive and then i requested him to give me a backup of the firmware in binary(.bin) format so that i could use an application like MTKFlash to recover my drive.
the good samaratian then told me that he could not use MTKFlash to get the firmware backup, apparently MTKFlash is incompatable with the Asus 5216a combo drive. so we then tried the XSF utility. that worked and now i have the firmware which i used to recover the drive with. the drive is now detected by the system bios and the lcd light works and so does the eject button but that’s about it! nothing else works! the drive is not detected by windows and so none of the windows based applications is able to acess it… further if i start the system with a bootale cd in the drive then also the system boots straight to windows… and yes, i have tried changing the ide channels…
on a side note, i have 40 conductor cable, so would upgrading to 80 conductor cable make any diffrence?
peace