Optical drive or IDE Channel issue?

sanbe

Hello to everyone, I need some help to recognize what exactly is the problem on my laptop. Here you go the story:

Fews days ago I bought an used laptop Asus L5850 with internal toshiba SD-R6112 optical drive. The guys who sell me the notebook said to me that the dvd-drive doesn´t work anymore after a bad firmware upgrade. So I thought not too bad, I can buy a new one and solve the problem.
Before to order the new drive a make a couple of test just to be sure the problem was the drive. So I took a Toshiba SD-C2402 from my storage room, I´ve installed on my laptop and boot the bios. But nothing, the bios doesn´t recognize it (the drive works smothly with other laptop). It shows Primary Master and Secondary Master on the main bios screens. So I suppose that it works just with master drive.
I start to looking on the net for some help, and I found the tip about slave/master & csel/r-csel. So I checked the toshiba drives and I found both should be set as csel from the factory by default. So I suppose the laptop works with csel "technology".
My question now is, There is a way to check if the problem is the laptop m/b, ide channel, connectors or whatelse?
Thanks and sorry for my bad english.
I hope this is the right forum for my topic.

furballi

1st thing is to wipe the HDD and clean install windows, especially with a USED PC.

Skith

before you wipe your HD, you might want to make sure the drive is compatable with the laptop. Laptop optical drives may not be exchangable between models, even if the drive is made by the same company.

Laptops are not like desktops, you often can't just swap parts.

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Kim Jong

If the BIOS doesn't detect the drive then it will be a waste of time formating the hard drive.

Some laptops have a single IDE channel; Primary master for the HDD and Primary Slave for the CD/DVD drive. Others, like yours, have two channels and require the CD/DVD drive to be set as [Secondary] Master.

Laptop drives don't have jumpers to set cable positions, this is set in the drives firmware. There are a number of firmwares for this drive over at RPC1.org, but non give details of the IDE configuration it will result in.

You could ask at the RPC1 forums and see if you get a response.

Remember, if you want to flash the drive, you will first have to install it in a laptop that it will be recognised in.

Direct link to the toshiba RPC1 page:
http://forum.rpc1.org/dl_firmware.ph...&manufactor=31

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