My friend was having probs with his Cyberdrive CWO38D (cdrw) drive and nero. After he dropped it off with me, I checked cyberdrive's website and found that the compatability issues could be fixed with a simple firmware update. I downloaded the firmware for the drive and started to install it. I have updated firmware several times and I know not to turn the comp off or do anything for that matter while it is installing, but halfway into the update his comp just froze up. About 30 secs later it rebooted and now the drive doesnt even show up in device manager or My Computer. Is there anyway I can fix this short of buying him another drive? (Which I'd hate to do since the CWO38D is a piece of crap anyway.)

In short , No. To update the firmware you need working firmware on the device. Try flashing it again but it's likely that the drive is dead.

Well that depends, I believe some Cyderdrive drives use mediatek chipsets, if this drive is one of them, then it should still be flashable at least via dos using mtkflash.

Thanks for thew help fellas, but the drive is trashed. I'm putting another one in for him.

So it wasn't mediatek then? Because they have a segment of the eprom that is usually left unflashed by a regular update. It is there so that the drive can still be flashed via dos if a regular update goes wrong. At least this is the case with Lite-On drives which use mediatek chipsets.