note: i was torn between posting here and modding. if i've got it wrong a kindly mod could happily shift it over to a more suitable subforum for me right, i'm in the process of converting my laptop into a suparcoolTM htpc. right now it looks a little bit like this: now there's a bit of a problem, which you've probably already spotted. the dvd isn't really gonna be much use popping out of the side of the case. i could design the case so that the longest edge would be going back into the shelf i guess, but i want it to fit into a regular media center, and that might look a bit iffy. Code: +---+ +----------+ | | | 1 | | 2 | +----------+ | | +---+ viewer seating position there, my leet ascii action should hopefully demonstrate that setup 1 would look better than setup 2. anyway, i digress. the problem is that my compaq armada has a rather nifty swappable drive bay. you simply unclip the dvd drive, and you can slot in a different drive. useful i guess, but for my project it's a royal pain. there is no ribbon cable, simply a connector on the mobo, and a matching one on the drives. they clip into each other, and voila, you're set. not so good when i want to rotate the drive by 90degrees though i've had a poke about and done a fair bit of googling and ebay searching, and i've not found any ribbon cables for my application. i guess there's no commercial need for such a product really. if there is such a product available, please let me know! i'd much rather just buy something than try bodging up a cable of my own and messing it up. if there really isn't such a product available, i was wondering about the feasabilty of fabricating my own. the connector on the drive looks like this: the connector on the mobo looks like the one on this thingermajig (not the parallel side obviously): now the parallel cable gizmo i just posted a photo of is for connecting a floppy drive externally. due to the data transfer rate i'm pretty sure it wouldn't work with a dvd drive. what i was wondering though, was whether buying one of them, cutting it up just to get the connector i need, then soldering Spoiler (haha that should be a laugh, tiny contact points and i suck at the soldering, not only suck, but suck hard) on a regular bit of ide ribbon to it, and rip apart my unused floppy drive to get the other connector and soldering that on to the other end of the ribbon would work? that should result in a flexible cable with appropriate connectors on the ends for me to use right? would it actually work? also, i'm really bad at soldering, especially when working with such tiny contacts, is it even worth me trying to do this? any input would be greatly appreciated
Interesting mod you are doing. So where are you actually going to put the drive once you (if you) extend it? It is quite hard to visualize what you are trying to acheive is the DVD drive going to be sitting on top of the laptop or next to it? Yeh i'll be interested if anyone comes up with a method other than soldering sorry i couldn't help.
If you unscrew the connector plate at the back of the drive you'll see another connector underneath. For that one you an buy a slimline to IDE converter which will let you connect it with standard IDE cables to your mobo. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=slimline+to+IDE+converter+&btnG=Google+zoeken&lr= Like in the bottom pic here.
Curby, a picture says a thousand words, so here's 3000's worth this is the layout of the mobo: this is how the dvd is meant to be slotted in: this is how i want it to be: all very roughly measured and sketchuped in about 10 mins, but it's good enough for you to get the idea coorz, thanks for the tip, but it's not so simple it should seem... compaq have a habit of making things difficult (well, difficult for the modder, simple for a regular user i guess). i removed the backplate of the dvd drive and this is what i end up with: sorry about the quality, the only camera i have is on my phone it's the same connector in the first post though (better quality pic as i copied it off some random website ) now it should seem there's no way of removing the custom connector compaq uses... and if i did, i'd just end up with some bare pcb contacts afaik. also, it's not being connected to a regular mobo, i want to use the laptop mobo, so there isn't even a regular ide type connector on there either (see 1st post) anyone have any other bright ideas?
