[wesley8q]

So my father-in-law bought a new 200gb hard drive, installed it into his iMac DV SE and installed the OS software. He then asked if he could open up his Yamaha 2100 firewire cdrw, unplug the cords and plug them into the old 13gb hard drive, basically making it an external hard drive in the firewire burner's case. I had no idea if this would work or not, but it sure did peak my interest.

So I took apart my LaCie 4x USB cdrw, unplugged the cables and pluged in my old 6gb hard drive. (I really had no idea what I was doing and I couldn't find any information on doing something like this!) With my 333mhz iMac on running os 8.6, I flipped the power on to the cdrw case and sure enough, the old hard drive showed up! I was pretty darn suprised but searching some later, being that both drives are IDE, it might have worked.

A few minutes later I get a call from my father-in-law and he said it's not working on his end, running 10 and 9.2. He opened system profiler and it didn't show anything for that firewire port and the old hard drive wasn't showing up, but it was spinning.

My questions are: is there something else he needs to install to get it to work or are things possibly not hooked up correctly or what!?

And since I was able to get this to work on my machine, couldn't I just go buy some old/broken cdrw, take out it's guts and turn it into an external hard drive?

If you can pass on some words of wisdom or links to other ideas, that'd be great!

Thanks for your help! Shawn

[bradoesch]

It should work with most enclosures. People here have had success fitting other drives in LaCie CD-RW cases, hard disks also.
I've put a few different hard drives in my Maxtor FireWire case, and they've all worked. They report as a Maxtor drive, but I can still access the disk fine.

Perhaps the jumpers on your Father-in-law's hard drive are wrong. Some drives have a setting for single drive and master. Usually you set the drive to master when you're putting it in an external case, but sometimes it's slave. He needs the use the same jumper settings as the CD-RW that was in there before.

And just out of curiosity, why does he want a 13 GB drive now that he's got a 200 GB? Also, did the iMac see the entire drive? I thought there was a size limitation on the ATA66 bus.

[BkueKanoodle]

I've seen this before. The older cd rom drives are set up to use older ide ata-33 or 66 interfaces and will not necessarily work with all drives. Could be the larger drive requires an 80 pin ide cable or just will not work with that controller. I also had one external cdrw that the mftr did something on the circuit board that would identify the hdd as a cd no matter what was in there.

[bradoesch]

Originally posted by BkueKanoodle:
Could be the larger drive requires an 80 pin ide cable or just will not work with that controller.

The 80 pin cables are only required if you want ATA66 (or is it 100?) compatibility. It will operature at a slower speed if you use a regular cable.