Laptop CD ROM drives on A1200's

[Hodgkinson]

Hi all,
I've seen so many people with laptop CD-Rom drives installed in their A1200's but I can't seem to see any information about the adaptors used with the CD-ROM drives..
Where to get them from?
Are they for specific CD-ROM drives?
What drives are likley to work and which drives wont?

Etc etc...

Can anyone give me any clues here?

Thanks,
Hodgkinson.

[motorollin]

The converters you need convert the "standard" 50 pin laptop CD drive connector to a 40-pin IDE connector and have a connector for power too. Something like this. Whether the adapter will work with your drive depends on whether it uses this connector.

--
moto

[smoorke]

isn't the A1200 IDE port 44 pin?

i got no experience in installing this
but i am interested in this kind of setup
so here's a couple of questions.

will it work with a ide splitter?
does extra power need to be routed?

[Darrin]

Thanks for that.  It's what I've been looking for to add a CD drive on my A3000D.  A laptop drive would fit nicely into a slot cut into the front of the casing and then attached to the Zorro IDE interface.

[WotTheFook]

What they are talking about is the 50-pin JAE socket on the back of the drive, this gets adapted to a 40 pin 3.5" IDE drive socket. You then need a 44-pin 2.5" to 40 pin 3.5" cable which are easily obtained from Ebay.

For power to the drive, tap into the 5v and 12v supplies to the floppy drive.

You will also need a buffered IDE interface like the IDEFix 97 or EIDE 99 boards, these adapt the single IDE port on the A1200 into two ports.

Finally, remember that most laptop DVD and CD drives are set as Master so putting it onto a cable with a hard drive could cause the bus to hang as both will be set to Master.

Put the hard drive on one port, the DVD drive on the other and it should work out OK.

There, I hope that has explained it for you.

WTF

[Hodgkinson]

Thanks for the info.

I wasn't actually aware that these Laptop CD-ROM adaptors were so easilly obtainable.

Regards,
Hodgkinson.

[xeron]

I've actually successfully used a laptop CD-Rom through both a laptop IDE to normal IDE converter which was directly connected to an ACard IDE to SCSI converter through my Blizzard SCSI.

[countzero]

the official name is JAE Adapter (Japan Aviation Electronics)