Thinkpads Forum

Great mod, thanks to the pioneers who went first. I'm waiting for a 770Z, I hope it has the M a t s u s h i t a SR-8171-L DVD Drive .

The 770 arrived. It does have the M a t s u s h i t a SR-8171-L DVD Drive. Any idea if a UDJA770 would work? The name implies it would .

Here's a link to an auction with pics of the connectors.

The raw interior drive of the UDJA770 should fit inside the caddy, but I do not think you will be able to swap your existing 770Z faceplate bezel with the UDJA770 bezel. I think the last UDJA model with the same bezel attachments is the UDJA760. But I can't say for sure.

The similarity of the 770 numbers is of course entirely coincidental.

Phil.

Phil, I did the mod with the UJDA750, and it looks great. The only problem I am having is that the 770Z will not boot XP with the drive installed. It hangs at the progress bar. I have to remove the drive, boot, then insert it into the bay. Any ideas? Also, will any of the IBM/Lenovo burner programs work on this setup? .e.g. Sonic

I beleive the problem that I am having is due to the fact that the UJDA750 drive I bought on EBay is firmware set for slave and it needs to be master. Any ideas? I tried the IBM firmware diskette, it said 'firmware update not needed'. This was not a new drive.

UJDA750 Bought on EBay

Can someone with this drive check device manager for IDE channel position and DMA enabled please?

Harryc wrote:Can someone with this drive check device manager for IDE channel position and DMA enabled please?

My 770Z currently has XP SP2 installed, but it is a blank install at the moment without any burning software. I usually use Nero 5, and I'm pretty sure I was also using Nero on my last OS install on this machine. I'll install it and confirm that it works okay under XP SP2 and get back to you.

No ideas regarding the hang at the progress bar. I have had something similar to that occur when I was trying to install XP and Win2000 from bootable CD's. In the case of Win2000, I ended up copying the install files over to the hard drive and installing from there. In the case of XP, I forget how I got around it, but it is possible that I used a different CD drive. In both cases, though, I think that I associated the problem with my CPU upgrade rather than with my CD drive.

In my current XP SP2 install, the UJDA750 shows up under the Primary IDE channel (the same one that has my hard drive on it).

Mmmmm...now that I look at the Primary IDE Channel, however, I see that it has both devices (Device 1 and Device 2: i.e. my hard drive and my UJDA750) set in PIO mode. It is possible that I turned DMA off when I was doing some file transferring, because I was having some issues with the way my 770 machines were interacting with hard drives installed in my SelectaDock III. Or else those are the defaults, and I just never fixed them since I hadn't yet set up DVD playback and CD-RW capabilities on this machine.

I've just now changed them to DMA if Available, and they are both showing now as Ultra DMA Mode 2. I'll reboot and doublecheck to see if they stick with these settings. And I'll install Nero 5 and do a test sometime over the next day.

Phil.

Phil, thanks for the update, let me know about the reboot results please. That is interesting that the drive showed up in the primary channel. In my machine it was secondary slave, all by itself on the channel, PIO mode only. I took the old drive and put it back in the machine, and it shows up as location 0(0), which is as you stated Primary Master, and it shares that position with the hard drive using DMA mode. I am still leaning towards the idea that the firmware is flashed to secondary slave on the UJDA750 here. I wonder how I can get a guaranteed master UJDA750?

Does it have to be the UJDA750? Every slimline optical IDE-Drive that is set to Master should work.

el-sahef wrote:Does it have to be the UJDA750? Every slimline optical IDE-Drive that is set to Master should work.

Your statement has me wondering ... I 'think' the answer is that the CDRW in question would have to have the connector in the right spot and in order for the front bezel/plate to fit without being cut or modified, you'd be limited to the model UJDA750. I am all ears for alternatives ...

The IDE connector was only off the right spot on the IBM Toshiba DVD drive. If you own the M a t s u s h i t a model (which is the one you have) the connector is at the standard position, which means that you can use just every modern slimline drive that is set to master. I bought a new DVD burner for my 770X, the NEC Optiarc AD-7543a and the IDE connector fits.

The faceplate did not fit, but I cutted all the plastic hooks away and modified the position of the pushbutton directly on the front of the drive (soldered some wires to it and used some epoxy to glue it to the right spot) so the button of the faceplate would fit. The same was done to the LED and after everything was at the right spot the faceplate was glued to the drive.

If you do not want to modify the faceplate, the you may be right that the UDA750 is the only alternative but modifying the plate and the drive is imo not too difficult and if you do it, you gain the possiblity to use a DVD burner.

edit: You can also force your drive to master by conneting pin 45 and 47. This works only if the firmware cares about the CSEL signal:
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/tips/Pioneer ... r_mod.html

Thanks for the link, I may try that pin mod. "automobile rear defogger repair kit" . LOL, that reminds me of my overclocking days with AMD CPU's ... bridging tiny contacts on the top of the CPU.