LG BH200 - replacement optical drive?

They use to be available on ebay as stand alone parts, but those guys selling appeared to be clueless as to where they came from. I've seen 'em, just never bought one.

I'd be pretty sure that you aren't going to find another "standard" drive. Remeber the BH200 was DVD, HD-DVD and bluray so the BH200 is expecting to be able to get that functionality out of the drive, if not I don't think you'd have much luck. I'd love to hear I'm wrong, but I doubt it. =(


may do better picking up a "used" one on fleabay. There's some up there now, including some of them used ones without any accessories.

The drive in my BH200 died as well, a few months back. Drive motor seized so the disk would not spin anymore.
I tried putting an LG GGC-H20L drive in it but the player would not recognize it.

I ended up paying too much for a GGR-L20N loader from e-bay but at least my player works now.

Hey gang,

Sorry to bother you with such an old model here. I've had this thing for 2 years. Purchased it brand new. A week ago it started talking forever to load BD's. Now it just gives me the ole "Disc Error"... I can although play standard DVD's and I have no HD-dvd's to test it. I took it out and put the drive in my PC and Windows 7 recognized it right away. Was still unable to play BD's on it (PC is custom built with ATI HD Radeon 5770/ HDCP Compliant and so is my 24" 1920 x 1080p Acer HD monitor).

So if someone could guide me as to any info on tracking one of these suckers down or something comparable, that will work in it, that would be greatly appreciated!

The Drive model number LG GGR-L20N and I believe is classified (Correct me if I'm wrong) as a Super Multi Blu-ray HD-DVD Rom Drive...

Thanks in advance fellas!

Andrew C.

anything new? the e-bay source is dead now...

I have a few of these available. PM me with a reasonable offer! I guaranty the drive is functional (I fully test before I sell) and offer a 7 day warranty after receipt. I will gladly exchange the drive if it is not functional in the 7 day period.

It looks like there is one on Ebay right now. Do a search for "GGR-L20N".

It's NOT my auction. I am only mentioning it as a service to those looking for a replacement drive.

If someone could dump the firmware from a GGR-L20N drive the GGC-H20L drive could be cross flashed with this firmware.

Where is the firmware located and what kinda chip? i am getting an Eprom programmer.

Athanasios

PM sent

You should be able to dump the firmware using devilclaw's flasher.
It can be downloaded from here.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/flasher/

Instructions to use this are here.
http://forum.rpc1.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=46137

Aren't the faces of the tray different?

Sure the tray looks different but it will still fit in properly. More importantly the player will be able to play discs again.

Okay, then. Someone here who owns a GGR-L20N (or is willing to use the one in his "spare" BH200) needs to do this and make the fw available!

It's a heck of an ask (and a heck of an undertaking) but I don't suppose a step-by-step guide (with pics) woul be possible for the rest of us not so technicaly minded?
Please?

If the drive as easily sourced (if) then I would consider it well worth doing if it meant I could keep my dual format player and not head back to some sort of seperate unit for each format.

I'm still very impressed with this player and I'd like hang on to it as long as possible.

You need to install the drive in your computer as a regular SATA optical drive.
Download the flasher utility from above link and copy flasher.exe from the zip file to a folder.
Open a command prompt.
In Vista or Win7 you need to run as administrator.
Type the following:
Flasher -D
It will list all the optical drives names and ID.
Then type the following:
Flasher -d [Drive ID] -m GGR-L20N.bin
Where [Drive ID] is the ID of the GGR-L20N drive listed after the first command.
It will take a couple of minutes to dump the firmware from the drive.
Once it is complete you can close the command window.
The firmware file should be in the same folder as flasher.exe

Couldn't you just download the latest 702 driver for the BH200 drive and flash the GGC-H20L drive with it? 702 driver download linked in this thread:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1009104

I tried this 702 driver however the flashing utilities cannot read the ROM file in the 702 driver package. Further investigation led to believe this is not a standard drive firmware image that can be flashed using a PC.
A BIN file will need to be generated from a dump of the firmware from a drive that has been updated to 702.

Hi,
"dump the firmware"-does it function???

It reads the firmware from the flash ROM on the optical drive and writes it into a file on your PC. Is anyone willing to do this for the benefit of us all?

i have in my hand a half-working BH200 drive (blu ray lazer died, but still plays HD and DVD) and two new OEM surplus GGC-H20s from ebay. gonna see what i can get going tonight.

if i get the BH200 working with a brand new drive it'll probably be for sale. planning on going back to a HTPC. stay tuned, pulling the drives now...

no dice, left a message on rpc1.org asking for info, we'll see what they say.

Thanks for trying; awaiting your further findings with bated breath...

the person who wrote the utility for the chipsets in these LG drives thinks that it might be possible. i'm gonna set the drive up in my HTPC and give him access to it via VNC to see if he can get anything from the standalone drive.

probably be tomorrow before i get the drive put back together and put in the HTPC, got some stuff to do today and a couple of blu-rays to rip in it before swapping the drives when i get home.

we'll see what pans out.

we will see what comes out...also awaiting...

Any news guys?

Athanasios

official LG repair says: no GGR-L20N available here in europe...

I don't think Xayd is able to setup his drive in a PC for us to try to dump the firmware from it.

Is anyone else able to do this?

What chip is it on? I wonder if it can be removed and then read with a chip reader. I have one of those.

Athanasios

It's the Renasas chip.

Devilsclaw at rpc1.org has created a utility to dump the firmware from the LG optical drives with this chipset. He doesn't have a GGR-L20N to try this on and I don't have a desktop PC to put the drive into.