***Warning, this is the most boring post on Outraged Richard—ever***

Update: A complete list of drivers for other computers’ TS-L632D drives is here. This is the mother load. Might as well give it a shot… Some of them worked for us. If a problem occurs, you can always flash your drive to another driver. Let’s play musical drivers!

If you did not come to this post with a TS-L632D drive, flashing utility, or firmware in mind, move along. That being said, let us go on with it:

This post is regarding the TSST Corp CD/DVD TS-L632D optical DVD drives provided with certain Dell laptop notebook computers, notably the Inspiron 6400 laden with Windows XP.

First the slight choppy jittery DVD movie video playback began, then the decision was made for the video drivers and codexes to be stripped off the hard drive, upgraded, and when that didn’t work, backgraded. There was a brief attempt at flashing the drive with Dell’s DE04 firmware but that permanently set the choppy audio and video playback.

There was a certain amount of hair pulling but as reason set in the cause was determined to be the TS-L632D’s firmware.

In short, the solution, as least in this case, was to flash the drive to Samsung’s TSST TS-L632D firmware:

First of all you must download the latest Dell firmware update for the drive (Currently this is DE04) because it contains the firmware flash tool you will need for flashing the Samsung firmware. Then you must download the latest Samsung firmware. The current SC04 firmware can be found here. [There are three versions of the Samsung TS-L632D firmware on softpedia.com] but maybe you can find a newer one on the net.

Now unpack the downloaded Dell firmware update and you should end up with a *.BIN file (which you don’t need) and a executable with a filename like SFDNWIN3.27.11.exe. Open a command-line, go to the directory which contains the executable and then start it with the command-line argument -NOCHECK. This parameter must be upper-case! Now select the Samsung firmware you have downloaded and then write it to the drive. Ignore the Version too old warning which may appear.

When you now reboot into your Linux then you can choose the write speed without any problems. Another interesting phenomena is that suddenly the drive is recognized as DVD-RAM capable. (ailis.com)

It is our sincere hope and wish that others afflicted with this malady should not suffer so prolonged as we. Our powerful presence in the search engine results will hopefully spread this message of hope and renewal.

Thank you, South Korean people.