[bsaxton]

My question is, can I just go out an by a cheapo internal IDE drive, hook it into the power and IDE cables of the USB-IDE interface of an old ZIPCD external USB drive and expect it to work?

Ok, I really want a cd-burner for my 333Mhz Mac, but I am really cheap. I bought an external ZipCD Iomega 4x4x2 or whatever on eBay. Got it, it burned one disk then quit. I fussed with it a bit to no avail - it only sometimes would write an entire CD, it usually quit before it finished and just blinked its annoying little green light at me while trying to spin the disk to no avail. It would not even eject the disk.

Ok, so I took the thing apart thinking, hey maybe I'll find a loose wire. Everything looked fine.

My guess is that the burner-part of the drive is bad, but the USB-IDE interface part is ok. My question is, can I just go out an by a cheapo internal IDE drive, hook it into the power and IDE cables of the USB-IDE interface and expect it to work?

The burner component has a standard IDE connection, a standard power connection, and an audio connection that connects into a circuit board. I tried hooking up an old interal IDE hard drive. It wound up, but did not load onto the computer and system profiler didn't show anything.

Thanks much

[diehlr]

Good question. My sister's ZipCD does the exact same thing. My gut feeling is it probably has to be a certain model of drive in order for the ZipCD drivers to work with it. It would be great if I could fix my sister's drive. Maybe the laser's power output needs to be adjusted slightly? I wonder if there is a potentiometer anywhere on the inside of the drive that would adjust the output, similar to on a Playstation CDROM laser.

[tooki]

All the adjustments like laser power are done electronically using special software utilities. You will not find any controls on the laser assembly or its controller.

tooki

[diehlr]

What special software utilities? Can they be downloaded?