The Dead Space Society

Never, ever, ever...EVER buy anything made by BusLink.

I bought a BusLink CD-RW drive last year for my most recent system. It was a relatively fast drive at a very good price. However, for the last year and a half I have fought off and on to get it to write to CD-RW media. Well, after staying up till 1 am (get up at 5:30 am), I finally fixed it.

BusCrap does not build their own hardware (at least for CD drives). Their burners are rebranded AOpen or Ricoh drives. So, when I went looking for firmware updates every couple of months to try to fix the damn thing, they never had any. Finally, last night, while searching for the errors I was getting, I found a post that had two lines at the bottom; "BusLink ##x##x## ----> AOpen" and "BusLink ##x##x## -----> Ricoh". I don't remember the speeds, so ## are in their place. This got me thinking, and I pulled my burner out of my system. After searching around, I found "AOpen" printed in very small letter in the FCC approval sticker. After more searching, I found which AOpen model my BusCrap was the equivalent of. After more searching, and several failed attempt, I finally found the right combination of Flash utility and firmware update. Now I can write CD-RW media through Nero (or other burning software), just not through Windows.
What a pain in the a$$!! Stay away from BusCr....I mean BusLink. It might be cheap, but it is not a value.