07-11-2004, 06:54 AM
In terms of the physical process, the hardest part is securing the drive to the case. This may or may not involve drive rails, but in any case a lot of screwdriver work... pay attention when you pull the old one out so you know how to put the other one in.
Otherwise, the connections are pretty simple. You've got a line from the power supply, and an IDE cable hooked to the motherboard, to plug in to the back of the drive. If you swap the drives, it's just a matter of not losing track of those two cables while you remove the old drive and secure the new one. There is also a slave/master jumper on the back of the drive. You probably don't need to worry about this, but if you have another drive (a hard drive, for instance) running off the same IDE cable, you will need to make sure it is set properly. You may also see small sockets for digital and analog cables to run to the sound card. These should not be connected to anything. The CD audio can pass as data through the IDE cable, which is generally now a better way to handle it.
Before you do any of this though, have you tried using a lens-cleaning CD on your "broken" drive? You may recall my rant at Jim's a while back... My DVD drive would not read any disks at all, and cleaning the lens fixed the problem. I suspect that a dirty lens is a far more common problem than actually burning out a drive.
Otherwise, the connections are pretty simple. You've got a line from the power supply, and an IDE cable hooked to the motherboard, to plug in to the back of the drive. If you swap the drives, it's just a matter of not losing track of those two cables while you remove the old drive and secure the new one. There is also a slave/master jumper on the back of the drive. You probably don't need to worry about this, but if you have another drive (a hard drive, for instance) running off the same IDE cable, you will need to make sure it is set properly. You may also see small sockets for digital and analog cables to run to the sound card. These should not be connected to anything. The CD audio can pass as data through the IDE cable, which is generally now a better way to handle it.
Before you do any of this though, have you tried using a lens-cleaning CD on your "broken" drive? You may recall my rant at Jim's a while back... My DVD drive would not read any disks at all, and cleaning the lens fixed the problem. I suspect that a dirty lens is a far more common problem than actually burning out a drive.