laptop CD-RW / DVD-ROM drive packed up

[munky]

Does anyone know of a good place (mail order, ideally) to get new drives from? It's for a Samsung V25, and the drive that has failed is a SN-324 which is apparently discontinued. Fleabay has some of these listed as "Samsung SN-324 for Dell laptops" - will these work in Samsung laptops or is it a different connection? Ideally, I'd like to replace it with a newer drive I guess, with DVD-RW capability.. although I have an external one so it's no biggie

cheers....

[greenlandy]

www.eclipsecomputers.com/product.aspx?code=DR-LAPTOP

Would this do yer?

[munky]

The NEC one looks spot on, thanks for that. Are laptop drives all a standard connection then?

[greenlandy]

Yep, bay size is normaly the problem on older laptops(say 4/5 years old). Make sure you don't misplace those little screws .

[thepassenger]

greenlandy said:

Yep, bay size is normaly the problem on older laptops(say 4/5 years old). Make sure you don't misplace those little screws .

Generally speaking the funky sized bays often have the drive wrapped in a caddy... the old Tosh Tecra PII-400 I used to have did this, once you started peeling away the plastic (saving the screws) it was a standard unit inside with a PCB to convert between the different connectors.

[munky]

Here's the update - bought the NEC drive, it fitted in perfectly. Trouble is, it didn't work! Wasn't recognised by the BIOS or windows. Tried telling the BIOS it was there, still nothing. Googled and found horror stories about soldering pins or flashing firmware to tell the drive it's a slave rather than master. Didn't fancy that.

Cue 4 hours of messing around with registry hacks, and then changing the BIOS settings, and hey presto it works! Next step was going to be updating the BIOS, may actually do that anyway.

NEC drive was £40, Samsung replacement would have been £160

[munky]

well when I say it works, it recognises the drive and plays CDs, haven't tried DVDs or burning anything yet..

[thepassenger]

munky said:

well when I say it works, it recognises the drive and plays CDs, haven't tried DVDs or burning anything yet..

Eek! I've read about all the hassel with Slave/Master stuff. Always avoided it *touches wood*

If the unit is reading CD's and be recognised it should work A-Ok for the other stuff so long as its optics are fine.

[munky]

CD burning works fine, just DVD to try.

Maybe the slave/master problem regarding laptops only affects certain brands.. there's lots of comments out there about problems with this NEC drive and Toshiba laptops. Initially in my device manager I could only see a primary IDE channel, so tried uninstalling the driver and rebooting, and hey presto XP announced finding both a primary and secondary IDE channel.. now I think that means that you can have 2 master drives, thus avoiding the slave issue..