Deregioning
May. 16th, 2004 09:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lostcarparkWas tidying up my computer's setup last night, and installing the rest of the programs after the reinstall. I got to putting on DVD playing software, and the first disk I put in happened to be region 1. A dialog popped up telling me that my drive was currently region 2, and I could only switch regions three more times.
"We'll soon put a stop to that," I thought. So I went looking firmware updates to remove the regioning from my drive. I'd thought about doing this when the drive was new, but didn't really want to invalidate the guarantee. Found a site with an archive of firmware versions and downloaded one that had been patched to remove the regioning.
In order to update the firmware, you have to boot into DOS. Could I find a DOS boot disk? I could not. So I thought, "I'm sure there's a way you can create a boot disk in Windows 2000." Found the place where I'm sure the option was, but it wasn't there (I'm probably thinking of a different version of Windows).
So I thought, "The Internet is my friend", and searched for boot disks. And up popped a site with images of boot disks for almost every version of Windows. So I download one for Win98SE, and it gives me a handy utility to format a disk and write the boot disk image to it.
With this on one floppy, and the DVD firmware update on another, I boot into DOS for the first time in years. The update is a success, and I boot back into Windows and pop in a region 1 DVD (Firefly), which now plays without a hitch.
Do the engineer's dance of victory...
"We'll soon put a stop to that," I thought. So I went looking firmware updates to remove the regioning from my drive. I'd thought about doing this when the drive was new, but didn't really want to invalidate the guarantee. Found a site with an archive of firmware versions and downloaded one that had been patched to remove the regioning.
In order to update the firmware, you have to boot into DOS. Could I find a DOS boot disk? I could not. So I thought, "I'm sure there's a way you can create a boot disk in Windows 2000." Found the place where I'm sure the option was, but it wasn't there (I'm probably thinking of a different version of Windows).
So I thought, "The Internet is my friend", and searched for boot disks. And up popped a site with images of boot disks for almost every version of Windows. So I download one for Win98SE, and it gives me a handy utility to format a disk and write the boot disk image to it.
With this on one floppy, and the DVD firmware update on another, I boot into DOS for the first time in years. The update is a success, and I boot back into Windows and pop in a region 1 DVD (Firefly), which now plays without a hitch.
Do the engineer's dance of victory...
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no subject
Date: 2004-05-17 07:58 am (UTC)Perhaps they took out the option, or moved it somewhere else, or I just forgot where it was. In any case, I haven't made a recovery disk in years because I've never had a failure that it proved helpful for. I find the best way to recover a NT/W2K/XP partition is to put it in another PC.
I think that's the program (or something very like it), and yes, it's very useful. The site had boot disk images for just about every version of Windows (including installation disks for NT-based versions for Windows for installing on systems too old to boot off CD).