need driver for optical drive ts-h493b

[moose25]

upgraded to windows 10 and lost my drivers. can anyone post a link please?

[SDH · Accepted solution]

I don't have a direct solution for you, but do have some tips.  Some of the older HP optical drives did not have drivers on the non-HP bootable install CDs/DVDs when booted, but after the full install from the discs the drivers would be present.  The workaround for that was to boot from an attached external USB CD/DVD reader which virtually always had drivers available for the USB bridge and thus you could get through the first phase of installing and thereafter the drivers were present on the target HDD or SSD.  Some had drivers on the HP-supplied restore disc/partition that let you boot from those discs, but the necessary drivers were not on the Microsoft sourced install CD/DVDs.  If you got lucky you never saw this issue, but a potential workaround was to flash update the firmware of the drive (if HP had an updater available) and that might take care of things.  I even saw this issue on a Z620's HP optical drive that could not install from a W7Pro64 "system builder" DVD bought straight from Microsoft but used the external USB-attached optical drive trick to get through that first hurdle.  Thereafter the install of drivers from the archive on the Microsoft DVD let that optical drive work great ever since.

I had one type of older HP optical drive that did not have a firmware updater from HP, but did from Dell.  I learned how to "cross flash" the firmware and the drive then ran with the Dell firmware and finally could be used with Windows 7.  It could not with the HP firmware, but that optical drive did work fine on XP.  Cross flashing was quite the exercise.

There is no HP FW update that I can see for your optical drive, but Lenovo and Dell do have one for the same drive.  It might be worth looking into, and I'd go with the Dell firmware for cross flashing, but it really is not worth the effort you'll have to put in learning about that.  My advice is different:

Go on eBay and find a "used" HP optical drive and buy that.  The later versions have higher part numbers, as you'll see.  Get something that starts with a 6 or even better a 7.  You'd want a CD R/W and also it should have DVD R/W.  You can get those, with shipping, for about 12.00 USD.  Used means virtually new, usually, given how little these optical drives are fired up these days.

[moose25]

sounds like the best way forward.

Many thanks