On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 22:51 +0000, Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
Re the last one: It's a rather old Compaq Armada 1750, and looking at it I feel doubtful about being able to replace the existing CDR drive. However, it's an interesting idea and, who knows, might work!
As far as the hardware is concerned it's just an IDE drive with a different connector (which is always the same across laptops) makes no difference whether it's DVD CD Reader Writer whatever.
As long as you are not planning on booting from it, it doesn't even matter if the Bios cannot recognise it (although worst case is usually that the Bios will just see it as a CD ROM which is fine for booting..even from DVD's)
What may bite you is the IDE interface spec (UltraDMA ATA100 etc etc) Your Compaq is getting on a bit and I am not sure how the modern slimline drives behave if plugged into an old ATA 33 or 66 interface. Maybe if you can find mention of that in dmesg or /var/log/messages.
Physically the drives are all the same with the exception of the mounting hardware (which screws on) the front (which un-clips with care) and the exact position of said mounting clips (which can vary sometimes)
No drivers as such should be required, just the right userspace tools for dvd writing and either the IDE-SCSI emulation (yuck) or a kernel that supports IDE disk burning (anything 2.6 but I think it was backported into later 2.4's as well)