[rescue] Partial success

[Phil Stracchino]

I got myself a slim DVD drive and a standard-PATA adapter board for it
from Centrix International, as suggested.  The drive fits perfectly in
the space I need it to fit into.  However, the adapter board is a
partial success.  It mates up just fine to the drive's connector, and
has a couple of tiny screws to attack the adapter to the back end of the
drive.

There are two problems, though.  First, the board is wider than the
drive by about 50%.  Depending on your application, this MAY mean the
board won't fit in the available space.  If you have clearance below,
but not above, the slim optical drive, you're OK.  If you have clearance
above, but not below, it's not going to fit.

(In my case, I have no clearance below the drive unless I remove the
second hard disk I fitted.  But I don't have a PATA cable that'll reach
to the second hard disk anyway, so I guess I'm not losing anything much
there.  Then again, I still need a cable to reach the optical drive.)

Second, the terminals of the PATA header and power connector are left
quite long, and completely uninsulated.  If you don't do something about
that, the back of the IDE connector will short out on the shell of the
drive.  So, make some provision for insulation, and I suggest clipping
the ends of the terminals too.

(What I did was clip the ends, grind all the stubs to about 1mm length
on my belt sander, then cover the ground ends with about a 2mm layer of
epoxy putty.)


The optical drive came without mounting screws, but I had some tiny
screws in my box of Thinkpad spare parts that fit.  Still, had I known
the problems I was going to run into with this, I think I'd have just
put in a full-size optical drive and not bothered trying to fit both
devices in the bay, even though the bracket in the case is designed for
doing exactly that.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.