[madmacs137]

I just tried to upgrade my 500 mhz iBook's stock cd-rom drive to a cd-rw drive, but I seem to have run into a few problems. The drive is a Teac CD-W28E taken from a SmartDisk FWCDRW-V8 FireWire drive.

I got the drive into the iBook without any problems (drive physically fits, the ATAPI connecter fits, etc), but I'm running into some problems because there is no master/slave switch on the drive.

The stock cd-rom is set to be the slave device and the Teac cd-rw drive seems to be hard-wired as the master device. I took the drive apart and looked at both sides of the circuit board inside, but there don't appear to be any clearly labeled jumpers (soldered or otherwise).

I thought about setting the HD to be the slave device, but the HD's jumper appears to be hard-wired into the IDE ribbon cable (the ribbon cable's connecter covers two of the jumper pins on the HD and there is no other jumper on it).

Does anyone have any ideas or recommendations on this one? I was hoping to be able to burn cd's on the run, but it looks like I'm going to be stuck lugging my FireWire drive around...

For what it's worth, the drive seems like it was good buy. It's kind of slow (8x8x24), but I got it for $99 at the Apple store and found a $50 off coupon from SmartDisk online -- the discount wasn't really advertised anywhere, I just stumbled on it one day. The drive has been working well in both OS 9 and X, and I haven't had any problems burning CDs with iTunes. The discount is good on purchases made through Oct 1.

[Jansar]

I apologize for not being completely addressing your question, but I have a blueberry iBook (the earliest model), and the CD-ROM drive does not work. IS there a possible way to find a replacement?

[madmacs137]

Originally posted by Jansar:
I apologize for not being completely addressing your question, but I have a blueberry iBook (the earliest model), and the CD-ROM drive does not work. IS there a possible way to find a replacement?

You should be able to find a replacement drive. There are a number of online sources (pbparts.com, ibookparts.com), none of which I have tried.

The cd-rom in my dual-USB appears to be the same model as the tray-loading iMacs. There seem to be a lot of older (Rev A, Rev B) iMacs with video and/or power supply problems, so you might be able to find one for cheap and salvage the cd-rom out of it.

Also, take a look on eBay...you can try searching for iBook cdrom or iMac cdrom.