[wellylug] cdrom transplant on old laptop

[Bill Christiansen]

The cdrom drive on my old Toshiba was starting to fail badly making it hard
to boot livecd's without buffer i/o errors so I picked up a replacement
drive on trademe that had the right connector and physical specs. It had the
added bonus of also being a cd writer and dvd reader. Was somewhat major
surgery on this old laptop, having to remove lots of
screws to split the casing and pull the ribbon cables. My heart nearly
sank when all I got was a blinking light after reassembly and powering
back on until I realised that one of the screws I'd left a bit loose
was also responsible for clamping the cpu onto the mother board.
Anyway in the end the operation was sucsessful, only problem is the new
drive is seen in linux as /dev/hdd instead of /dev/hdc which is not really a
problem except the bios can't see it at all meaning I can't boot from it.
Fortunately though I'd made an SBM (smart boot manager) floppy while the old
cd drive was still in the laptop and it has an entry for the cd drive so I
can boot from the floppy then when the menu comes up select the cd drive and
it will boot my new cd drive but if I tell SBM to rescan my devices it can't
see the new drive either. I'll be OK as long as I never loose the original
floppy I made.
Old drive was TEAC CD-224E, new drive shows up as QSI
CD-RW/DVD-ROM SBW-242. Anyone know if the master/slave status is
changeable on these laptop drives?

Bill
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