Pismo optical drive swap not working

5 posts / 0 new
Last post
iamdigitalman's picture
Offline
Last seen: 1 year 8 months ago
Joined: Mar 1 2004 - 22:18
Posts: 629
Pismo optical drive swap not working

Hi all. I have a Teac DW-224E DVD-ROM/CDRW module from my mother's dead toshiba laptop. IIRC, it was a fried motherboard that did it in. So, I took out the optical drive, removed the bezel, and compared it to my pismo's DVD drive. I noticed the simmilar shape, and remembered the pismo optical drive swaps of yore I have read about, and decided to try it myself. I removed the 6 (actually 5, one of them is missing) screws from the carriage, and swapped the drives around. I don't know why, but I had a little trouble getting the screw mounts to line up with the holes, but I got it all screwed back together.

I popped the new cobbled together device in my pismo, and I booted up. I launched into Apple System Profiler, and went to the ATA section. It does show up, and I went to disc burning and this is what I got:

[QUOTE]TEAC DW-224E:

Firmware Revision: F.0A
Interconnect: ATAPI
Burn Support: Yes (Apple Supported)
Cache: 1658 KB
Reads DVD: Yes
CD-Write: -R, -RW
Burn Underrun Protection CD: No
Write Strategies: CD-TAO, CD-SAO
Media: No
[QUOTE]

I opened it up (using the button on the ribbon, the faceplate won't attach from the DVD drive), and closed the tray. It blinked, and blinked, and blinked. I could hear it spinning, but it did not show up in the finder. It just kept blinking, until a minute or so later POP, the tray ejected all by it's self. I tried both a pressed and burned CD and DVD, all with the same result.

Is it a dead drive? or is it something else? I don't think it's a dead drive, since it shows up in ASP. I also don't think I need to use patch burn on it, since it recognizes it as a CD burner (as well as read DVD.)

thanks.

-digital Wink

themike's picture
Offline
Last seen: 12 years 4 months ago
Joined: Jul 21 2004 - 19:33
Posts: 455
I was able to swap a CD burne

I was able to swap a CD burner from a Toshiba lappy into a G3 iBook with no issues whatsoever.
Maybe your new drive is not properly set to slave/master?

iamdigitalman's picture
Offline
Last seen: 1 year 8 months ago
Joined: Mar 1 2004 - 22:18
Posts: 629
laptop optical drives have sl

laptop optical drives have slave master settings? I know the HD does, but not the optical drive.

How am I supposed to change it, and where is the jumper block located?

-digital Wink

Eudimorphodon's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 months 3 weeks ago
Joined: Dec 21 2003 - 14:14
Posts: 1207
Well...

I haven't seen a laptop optical drive with a physical master/slave for a *long* time. (Some very old drives, like iMac tray-loader vintage, have a tiny little slide switch along the back edge.) Now they generally use cable select and *only* cable select. (Here's a page filled with asinine Javascript that explains in broken Engrish how you, if you really need to, can solder on tiny little pins to force Master mode on a drive that "failsafes" to Slave on non-cable-select cables.) Apparently some optical drives can also take a firmware flash to force a particular mode, but...

The fact that the drive shows up in system profiler makes me think there's something at work other then a master/slave problem. If you have a suitable desktop machine you could try verifying that the drive works with one of those full-size ATA adapters, which might narrow it down.

--Peace

dankephoto's picture
Offline
Last seen: 9 months 1 week ago
Joined: Dec 20 2003 - 10:38
Posts: 1899
my vote - bad drive

As Eudi pointed out, if it shows up in ASP, then it's more than likely not a M/S problem. My bet is that the drive has issues.

dan k

Log in or register to post comments