Well a client brought in his laptop to be serviced and well the whole LCD and mobo was dead. He bought a used thinkpad that was much faster and I transfered all of crap over to it. Anyway I took the broken laptop home and striped it down. I took the DVD drive and the HD. I used the HD for a external backup device. I took off the front face of the DVD drive and then took apart my iBook. It took me three hours lol. I wanted to be carefull not to break anything. I got the old 24x CD-ROM out and hooked up the DVD. Before I tested it I put it all back together. Well I fired it up and theres a drive conflict. The HD and DVD are bot set to master
So as we speak i'm trying to build up straegh to take the iBook back apart to change the dip switch on the DVD.

Seems like I just can't win. I pulled out the DVD and there is no dip switch to set it to slave.
Is there a device that will turn a IDE drive into Firewire and is cheap?

TCPMeta wrote:


sorry to hear about your bad luck.

if you really want to use this system then I say just get an external optical or another internal. I have never seen external enclosures for laptop optical drives though.

Thats strange. Are the iBooks from different series? Maybe your board wasnt designed to accept that hardware? I would do some research before you make it ouboard. Hopefully someone with some knowledge on this can chim in.
-maestro

Hey check here and search for enclosures firewire B)

The solution is simple, many (if not most) laptop internal optical drives are are hard wired to master, just set the hard drive to slave, the apple hard drive connector leaves the last four pins on the hard disk exposed, jump the two closest to the cable. I had the same problem with my first iBook (the "Tired Roadwarrior" Mod") Trust me its no big deal. Everything still works, boots etc. just fine.

the only disadvantage to that would be losing the ability to target mode the ibook. simialr instaces when i put my laptop combo drive and laptop hardrive into my cube. had to set the hardrive to slave. everything works great. and if i need to transfer something i use an ethernet cable.

[censored]) also connects to the jumper for the master selection. I would mod the cable so it would select cablbe select or slave, it's not like it's part of the wireing on it. Yet with my luck I would mess it up. I might just go ahead and find a laptop slim DVD drive that has settings for master and slave.

I wouldn't be 100% sure that you would lose firewire target mode by running the HD as slave. Some Macs are more than happy to share multiple drives including optical drives in firewire mode.

What is the make/model of the drive? There may be a simple mod to switch it to slave anyway...

Bad news. I _censored_ up the ribbon cable to my iBook. Anyone have a spare to give me or sell to me?

Post edited by: whitlock, at: 2005/10/16 13:50