Installing a DVD Burner

[Fancy Pants]

Just ordered one off of New Egg. Do I need to find someone to install it or is it a straight forward process. It's going in my kids computer which an old Compaq 1.2 megahertz. It's going to replace the CD burner on there. I figure the connections will be the same, but was wondering if there's a trick to getting the burners out and in there. Any help will be appreciated.

 

[Quagmire]

It's fairly easy, theres two connections, one for power and one that goes to the mother board. Not too hard to figure out.

Usually theres some screws on each side to remove the drive from the trey. You should be able to do it yourself.

 

[idigTexas]

The only possible snag is the jumper setting. The choices are usually "master," "slave," and "cable select." Chack the setting on the old drive. Set the new drive accordingly, and you'll be fine.

 

[LosIllini]

The Link

Good Luck!

 

[Apostle7550]

The unit will ship with the right jumper settings (assuming you're using XP Pro.) Just take the cables off the CDRW and plug them into the DVDRW. You'll be shocked how easy it is.

 

[zork]

Dell uses cable select since about '98. That means where the drive is plugged on the cable determines whether it is treated as master or slave. Typically you want your burner to be in the master position on the cable select cable, not imperative on that just preferred.

Not sure about Compaqs. When you open up the case, many times the cable will have a label of some kind letting you know that it is cable sectect type. It is important to know but not fatal to the drive if you mess it up temporarily. If you do the jumper wrong the drive won't show itself on boot but you aren't hurting it by doing it wrong on the jumpering. (at least I've never had a drive fail because it was jumpered wrong)

So you would then just change the jumper setting to the correct other choice. The recommendation on checking how the old drive is jumpered is a good one.

If unclear, I would try cable select(CS) first, then Master next if CS didn't work. Slave would only be if there were two devices plugged to your cable. If there was room you could leave the cd burner in there but I'd probably make it the slave. Which would mean a bit more jumpering and possible slot changes due to the limited cable length you will undoubtably become familiar with when you do this.

Good luck. Tell us how it goes.

 

[Fancy Pants]

Thanks everybody for the help. Did it friday in a couple of minutes. The CD-RW jumper was set to Cable Select, so I did the same. Damn thing is sweet. Now I just have to learn to burn DVD's, but burning cd's at 48x kicks ***.