ziloo wrote: ↑Mon Jun 13, 2022 8:32 am
Hello Folks,
I have a Dell Inspiron 6400 with a dead DVD drive, and
a nice still functioning IBM DVD drive in my T42. Just for
the fun of it, I decided to see whether the IBM drive
would compare with the Dell drive. The geometry of
the two is the same but the Dell drive is a few millimeter
thicker than the IBM drive. Also Dell has a small extension
tongue at the end with a screw hole in it... so that after
inserting the DVD drive inside, it gets fixed in place by
a screw to the bottom of the laptop.
Is there any option for a T42 DVD drive replacement other
than an external drive, or a refurbished internal IBM type?
From somebody with rich experience with both the Dell and the ThinkPad:
No, you absolutely cannot swap the DVD drive between them. They are neither the same height nor the same connector - T4x/T6x use a propietrary connector that's embedded onto the optical drive itself. Usually propietrary connectors of this era are necessary to achieve hot swapping, but while many other manufacturers make do by attaching an interposer board to a standard connector optical drive (like the Compaq nc6230 nc6400 6910p, which is also of the same slim height IDE variety but the IDE drive inside is standard for slim height) , not the case for T4x.
The connector for the Inspiron 6400 though is totally standard and the optical drive is standard as well. If you royally have trouble finding an optical drive from any other 2005-2007 laptop on ebay, just get a working Dell D-bay DVD+-RW burner drive and disassemble the cage and swap over the face plate - the drive inside and face plate mounts are the same for 2005 and later variants, which is why you should get the burner so you can make sure it is of a later variant.
The small "extension tongue" can be easily transferred across if you get such a drive.
As for hard drive, you CANNOT use the hard drive from a T4x on that 6400 either. T4x use IDE hard drives, Inspiron 6400 is of T60 generation and use SATA1 interface and 945 chipset, but IDE for optical drives.
If you have a dead T/R60 by any chance though, you can transfer the hard drive, RAM as well as CPU as again both use the 945 chipset. Wifi cards are not interchangable though as on the T/R60 there is both the whitelist in BIOS (which you can remove with a custom BIOS) as well as propietrary firmware inside the wifi card that prevents it from working in any non-ThinkPad machines! (But Inspiron 6400 has zero whitelist for wifi cards)
Inspiron 6400 itself is nothing special though. The build quality isn't the best, and some rare nvidia variants can have GPU failure (but video card is modular), but otherwise chances are the laptop will live. The successor, Inspiron 1520, is a whole world better of a laptop though.
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