This is my first post on these forums, having read through countless (well hours and hours) of posts on this amazingly informative site I've over come nearly all of my recording issues with DVD and CDs and the like but now have come to another brick wall. About a month ago I purchased the Pioneer 111D Black model, which, being as I use a laptop also bought a Sum Vision 5.25" Aluminum Mobile Enclosure to house it. It connects to my Patriot Laptop via a USB 2.0 connection and works and runs fine. The previous statement is only so true however, I cannot burn any DVD-R, only +R. And yesterday I purchased some shiny new Datawrite 8.5GB DVD+R DL 2.4x discs and to my disarray they fail to burn within 3 seconds of me starting it. After reading and reading looking for solutions i came to the conclusion it must be the firmware (currently 1.09 i believe) but when i try to update the firmware using either the EXT download from the dangerous brothers website or the official one from http://wwwbsc.pioneer.co.jp/product-e/ibs/device_e/dev00001r_e.html it gets to the "re-flashing drive" then brings up a box telling me it failed, and if i wish to retry, which i do, then i wait for a couple of minutes and it tells me there is a disc in the drive which i should remove, although one is not present and the program terminates. If anyone can help me I would be so grateful, I've searched and searched but no one seems to be having the same problem as me. Hopefully someone out there can help!
This may seem like a round-about way to do things but if you have a desktop available try connecting it through IDE temporarily. Check to see if it can write -Rs and DualLayers while its in the desktop. If you get the same results try installing the new firmware while the 111D is in the desktop connected through the IDE interface. I'm not really an expert on these matters but my feeling is that there may be issues with flashing it through the USB so, try giving the a shot with IDE interface. If it still come up with errors after all this see if the drive still works by testing with +Rs that worked for you before. If it doesn't work your drive may have been reduced to a brick but lets hope that isn't the case.
