Laptop Drive not being recognized

[Big Booger]

I recently bought a replacement drive for my laptop, and this is really screwing me up. I spent about 6 hours last night, till about 2:15am from about 8pm... working on it.

Installing it took about 45 minutes.. well maybe a little longer because I had to find my pdf service manual.. took about 20 minutes or so.

ONce I got it in, I booted windows. I am running longhorn 4008 atm.. that may be a reason this is screwed.. who knows.

Well I prayed to god when I booted that I hadn't shorted the motherboard or anything.. nope I hadn't boots fine. When it booted the cdrom spins with a disk inside.. like it is reading the disk. The power works. The tray button works, it pops out when I push it. It spins and reads disks etc.. I can tell it works.

But windows will not read the drive. I tried scanning for the hardware changes.. I tried manually adding the device.. There's no option for a CDROM, CDRW, or DVD drive. Bare in mind I went from a regular play 24X CDROM to a Combo CDRW/DVD drive. The previous drive is fried.. after about 3 years of good use it has had it..

So after nothing worked, I thought, well maybe I didn't seat the drive well enough. So I take the laptop apart..

Took the drive out, checked it over, looked fine. reinstalled it, this time paying special attention to the connector. Firmly seated it into the interface socket on the motherboard.

Booted the machine, popped a CD inside.. it spun up.. like it was reading the disk. Once in windows, I went to my computer and the drive was missing.. it was not being added automatically... like windows cannot read the drive or something.

I tried in vane to find a driver that would work:

Teac DW-224E DVD+CDRW - 8x + 24x24x24

that is the drive title and type.


Teac says that drive should be picked up with windows.

so then I go to this site and cannot believe my ears:
http://forum.rpc1.org/printview.php?t=8368&start=0

I haven't tried their suggestions to isolate pin #47 for the cable select feature and I haven't tried the firmware update (I don't want to screw the drive)....

Do any of you have any suggestions before I take these drastic steps?

[Big Booger]

Well I just now figured it out, after nearly 18 hours of trying to get it to work.

It seems PIN 47 was indeed the way to go. BUt I didn't want to destroy the PIN and perhaps negate any warranty that the drive comes with, so instead, on the female side (on the drive 50 pin slot) like this guy did:

http://www.freewebs.com/lusfe/photo/pin47.jpg

Instead, I took a small strip of tape, barely a millimeter in width, and taped the pin 47 over with the tape. So when it connected with the male end on the motherboard, it never made contact. The first time it didn't work, but the after the second try it worked fine and dandy.

I wished this drive had jumpers.. that would have made it so much easier..

So thus far, I can say you can upgrade quite a few components of a laptop, aside from three items:
Screen (not sure about this, maybe you can maybe you can't)
Motherboard (depends on the upgrade model)
video card (this is the downside to a laptop.. most have onboard video)


I have changed/upgraded:
optical drive
Hard drive
ram
CPU
battery
cooling fan (previous one died)

Job done! I am thrilled.

[zipp51]

Hey that's great BB I'm glad you sorted it out.I know the feeling of frustration and then accomplishment with this stuff.1st question;Was there another brand drive you could have bought that would have been 100% compatible?2nd question;Do you know of a resource site that can match up hard drive(or other drive) for different brand laptops?My lappy has a 6GB HD and while the prices are low I would like to upgrade to at least a 30GB.I have an Acer Travelmate 521TE,and I think it has an IBM HD.:D

[SupaStar]

Great success story boogs....wish i had more of these ;)

[cash_site]

Firstly great job BB.

Good points too Zipp, i would be interested too. I have IBM 600e with 6gb HD and want to upgrade to 30gb :D There was a IBM600x with 30gb, so the motherboard should support it. Can i put in a high RPM HD, are all HD compatible?

thx.

[Big Booger]

Yeah I am thrilled fellas. It was a major challenge. Zipp, I could have bought a direct replacement drive, but I wanted to upgrade. This drive has burn proof technology, DVD, CDRW, CDROM, CDR, etc..

It burns at 24X, Rewrites at 24X and reads at 24X. The DVD is 8X. I got it really cheap too.. 179.99 Shipped to Japan. :D

Honestly I checked on about 10 different drives before I chose this one. BUt one thing I didn't do was check on the internet for any kind of anomalies like this one had. In the future I will, and I'll be prepared for that.

As for HDD, as long as your BIOS supports it, I think any 2.5" notebook drive will work.

Mine was a 6GB 3200RPM drive. I upgraded to a 30GB, 4200 RPM drive. (now they have a 80GB 7200RPM notebook drive with an 8MB cache (tempted to get it too)
:D

I think when you have issues is with laptops that are 5 or more years old. They generally have to have the BIOS flashed to be able to read larger drives. I had an old winbook from 1993 that wouldn't take any drive over 8GB.. no matter what I did. I finally just gave it away.

Zipp, based on this site:
http://www.bixnet.com/actrav521te5.html

Your laptop can take up to the 80GB drive size. Hard drives are much easier to upgrade than the optical drives. I figured that out last night.

I have also upgraded a co-workers Gateway Solo 9300 from a 10GB HDD to a 40GB 4200 RPM toshiba drive.

One thing to note, the faster the drive, the hotter it gets and the louder it becomes. But read access nearly doubled for me.

Last night ol' lynch caught me in mood.. I was furious at the drive.. :D Sorry Lynch if I sounded rude. LMAO. And it was on the low end when I was feeling lousy cause it still wasn't fixed.

Needless to say I won't be upgrading anything else as I think this laptop has had it :D She'll be retired to the wife, and I will be getting a new one in the near future.