Upgrading Frimware on a Memorex MP5125A DVD Burner

Recently I discovered that I was unable to burn to 8x write disks with my Memorex 2.4x DVD+R/RW (MP5125A). I was hoping that this was fixed in a newer version of firmware. The process of upgrading the firmware was not quite straight forward so here is what I did.

Update: 5 minutes after i posted the story.I found a link to the Memorex version of the 1.72 firmware (Local).So the trick is not needed. I wish I had found this first.

I started looking around Memorex.com for the frimware, but there was no mention of my drive anywhere. After a little Googling i found out that this drive is the Ricoh MP5125A with a Memorex stickers, that explains why I always thought that it looked an awful lot like my old Ricoh CD-R drive.I downloaded the firmware for the Ricoh Drive and tried flashing the drive but it failed, the drive string didn't match and the flash software was 'protecting' me since nobody would intentionally want to put Ricoh firmware on a Memorex drive of course.A little more Googling and I found a link to the newest firmware on Memorex's site, but the link was dead, jerks! Next I found a writeup about how to fool the flashing software. What you do is get the new firmware from Ricoh and a old firmware for your drive which thankfully memorex still had on their site. Unpack both packages into the same directory. Start the Rflash program and choose the old firmware, click next. Now you want to rename the new firmware to the name of the old one. Once you do that you can start flashing. There is a down side to using the Ricoh firmware, if you are still using the software that came with your drive, some of it won't work any more because it will see your drive as a Ricoh and is only programmed to work with Memorex.Here are some links to the software mentioned, plus local copies incase any of the links go dead in the future.Memorex 1.51 Firmware (Local) Ricoh 1.72 Firmware and Flash Utility (Local)