Flashing a Sony DVD burner

I'm the happy owner of a Sony DRU-800A DVD burner, and I wanted to upgrade the firmware, as I had some little burning problems I hoped the upgrade would fix. Of course, Sony's website provides only Win32 flashers. They run under wine, but they don't actually do anything. Apparently, the way these win32 ioctls are implemented rely on the old hdc=scsi deprecated kernel interface. The trick is that we need a 2.4 kernel to get it working properly. So here are the steps I took:

1. Get a bootable sarge with a 2.4 kernel, and boot it with hdc=scsi(hdc is the device name of your burner). You might need to compile the kernel yourself for it to work properly. In any case, you should see something like that in the output of dmesg

   scsi0 : SCSI host adapter emulation for IDE ATAPI devices
     Vendor: PLEXTOR   Model: DVD-ROM PX-130A   Rev: 1.02
     Type:   CD-ROM                             ANSI SCSI revision: 02
   Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0 at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
   sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 0x/50x cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray
   

2. Make sure wine is installed, the sarge version worked fine for me (more recent versions compiled by hand did not).
3. Make sure there is an appropriate /etc/fstab entry for the SCSI CDROM device. I have something like:

   /dev/sr0        /media/dvd              auto    defaults        
   

4. Make sure there is an appropriate device symlink in /root/.wine/dosdevices. With the above fstab entry, the following would work:

   ln -s /media/dvd d:
   

5. Run the flasher as root (giving write permissions for all SCSI devices to a normal user does not work)
6. Reboot (to your normal system), and check you firmware version number with

   wodim -scanbus
   

This did work fine for the aforementioned DVD burner. It did not get my DVD reader to get flashed, though. But it's worth a try, and once the sarge boot is setup, you won't lose too much time.

As a conclusion, rush to get a sarge boot before lenny goes out and sarge is removed from the debian mirrors !