WTB: UltraBay II CD or DVD drive (for TP 770 series)

[Edward Mendelson]

Thanks to Tom Lightbody, I have a terrific TP 770z. Tom's machine came with an UltraBay II FDD module; a wrecked 770z that I got earlier came with a CD module, but it produces nothing but read errors when I try to install XP from a half-dozen different CDs, including two burned yesterday.

So I'm on the market for either of these units, as listed in the TP book:

24X-10X5 CD-ROM Drive (UltraBay II) 02K0516

2X5 DVD Drive (UltraBay II) 05K8886

The CD-ROM that I've got has the FRU part number 02K0515, so that presumably should work also.

I've tried blasting the drive mechanism with compressed air, but it doesn't seem to stop the write errors.

[theterminator93]

I have one spare DVD-ROM drive handy.

I recall it working OK to play DVDs when I was testing out the 770, but its release mechanism is a bit sticky so I had to use a paper clip to get it to open. If this doesn't bother you, I can test it out this weekend and let you know how it fares.

[Edward Mendelson]

I have one spare DVD-ROM drive handy.

I recall it working OK to play DVDs when I was testing out the 770, but its release mechanism is a bit sticky so I had to use a paper clip to get it to open. If this doesn't bother you, I can test it out this weekend and let you know how it fares.

Thanks for this -another forum member has a small supply of the DVD drives, and is going to send me one, so I think I'm OK.

I also suspect that the drive I have has problems with some media, and not others, so am still experimenting.

Thanks again - and thanks again to everyone on this terrifically well-informed and generous forum.

[kfzhu1229]

Hi there again,
I have the DVD drive actually and do remember that I told you the DVD drives for this will NOT work correctly with CD's unless you put some spacer on the spinning part of the drive to raise them up, or else it will rub your disc against the bottom rubberised coating and kill the motor or the disc!
Also, these early drives are unreliable if you use any rewritable discs. Try a known good CD-ROM disc (not even a CD-R one) to root that out.
Also try to boot from floppy via the external floppy module and see from there (i.e. Windows 98 startup floppy) if it reads the CD's. Sometimes these things are also unreliable in booting off bootable media.
I fitted a DVD-ROM Ultrabay 2000 drive in the Ultraslimbay on the ThinkPad 600 to root basically all of these out.
One workaround for you to install Windows XP though, is to use a similarly aged (definitely T/A3x series or older) ThinkPad capable of ACPI (the OG TP 600 will NOT work) with a working drive, boot to DOS (with FAT32 support), copy all files under i386 to your hard drive after fdisk and format, then run winnt.exe and finish the first stage that's executed under the character based GUI that's before the first reboot, then when it asks you to reboot you shut down the machine and transfer the HDD back to the 770.
I would install Windows XP with FAT32 partition anyway because I find these machines to be very unreliable in getting NTFS version 3.x partitions to boot correctly.

[Edward Mendelson]

Hi there again,
I have the DVD drive actually and do remember that I told you the DVD drives for this will NOT work correctly with CD's unless you put some spacer on the spinning part of the drive to raise them up, or else it will rub your disc against the bottom rubberised coating and kill the motor or the disc!
Also, these early drives are unreliable if you use any rewritable discs. Try a known good CD-ROM disc (not even a CD-R one) to root that out.
Also try to boot from floppy via the external floppy module and see from there (i.e. Windows 98 startup floppy) if it reads the CD's. Sometimes these things are also unreliable in booting off bootable media.
I fitted a DVD-ROM Ultrabay 2000 drive in the Ultraslimbay on the ThinkPad 600 to root basically all of these out.

This is very interesting information. I've got a DVD drive coming, and will test it with an CD that I'm willing to use before risking anything else. I don't have an external floppy for this machine (the one I had couldn't read any disks), but a replacement is on the way, and I'll use that when testing. Thank you for this information!

[kfzhu1229]

This is very interesting information. I've got a DVD drive coming, and will test it with an CD that I'm willing to use before risking anything else. I don't have an external floppy for this machine (the one I had couldn't read any disks), but a replacement is on the way, and I'll use that when testing. Thank you for this information!

Fixing a floppy that doesn't read any disks is usually very easy and involves with solely disassembling the drive and clean the drive heads with cotton swab + alcohol. worked till this day on my newer Ultrabay 2000 floppy drive and on an older built in floppy drive from a Latitude XPi P75D.
Also I have edited my previous post for a potential workaround so you can have a working 770Z for now.

[pkiff]

[Apologies to anyone if this post gets in the way of an intended sale (Let me know if it does, and I'll give myself a warning and delete it promptly.)]

You might consider trying to replace the innards of a standard 770 CD/DVD drive caddy with a slightly newer/better drive. I would specifically recommend finding a caddy with a M a t s u s h i t a SR-8171-L DVD Drive (IBM FRU: 05k9066 ASM P/N: 05K9065) and replacing it with a Panasonic UJDA-750 (a more up-to-date CDRW/DVD model manufactured in 2005-ish):
http://thinkpads.kiff.ca/770z/cdrw_matching_bezels

This gives you a significant upgrade on the quality of the drive compared to any original drive that shipped with a 770X/Z model. It also gives you a CD-RW drive, which is handy...at least it was in the mid-1990's!

Different 770 OEM drives have different connectors with their internal drives. From my cursory look back in 2006, only the caddies that came with the M a t s u s h i t a SR-8171-L DVD Drive have a standard connector that allows you to swap in another standard drive from a similiar era:
Post 5 in thread: Cdrw drive upgrade for 770Z (Dial up user pictures ! )

Phil.

[Edward Mendelson]

Hello Phil,

No need to worry about an intended sale - I already bought a DVD drive from a forum member and it works very well.

Your upgrade suggestion looks very interesting - I'll keep my eye out for one of those drives. The project looks very easy and shouldn't cost much...

[olex126]

Hi Edward.

I will second pkiff's suggestion of the Panasonic UJDA750 DVD Player as a replacement for the stock 770 DVD drive.

I replaced the stock DVD player last year on my 770Z, as it was horrendous in reading almost all burned discs, and reading only about 50% of factory-pressed discs, including factory MS install discs, factory OS/2 Warp discs, etc. Totally infuriating! . I spent a day needlessly re-burning various discs on different media to no avail, before finally spending the $20 necessary to make this a fully functioning unit.

Once the replacement drive was installed (simple conversion process to make it fit), 100% read efficiency on all discs, either burned or pressed. Went on to flawlessly install any and all MS operating systems and OS/2 Warp.

Absolutely worthwhile upgrade to a very fine machine!

Regards.

Dave

[theterminator93]

Does UJDA750 interchange with UJDA740, 760 and 770 for this application? There's a super cheap option on Amazon right now, but it may be any of those models.

[kfzhu1229]

I replaced the stock DVD player last year on my 770Z, as it was horrendous in reading almost all burned discs, and reading only about 50% of factory-pressed discs, including factory MS install discs, factory OS/2 Warp discs, etc. Totally infuriating! . I spent a day needlessly re-burning various discs on different media to no avail, before finally spending the $20 necessary to make this a fully functioning unit.

What's a small nuisance on top of this is the fact that the factory DVD drive on those will also refuse to play any store bought DVD video because there is the region setting thing that's not supported on this early DVD drive and as such the DRM prevents the disc from being played on this DVD drive short of mods to your media players. But with those newer software your DVD decoder card won't work so yeah.

[pkiff]

Does UJDA750 interchange with UJDA740, 760 and 770 for this application?

It depends if you want to swap your faceplate as well as your drive. Any of those models should be able to connect to the internal drive connector inside your caddy - assuming that you started with a M a t s u s h i t a SR-8171-L DVD Drive (IBM FRU: 05k9066 ASM P/N: 05K9065) version of the 770/E/ED/X/Z drives. But you may not be able to cleanly swap the faceplate off your old drive with the UJDA770.

When I was researching this back in 2006, I concluded from looking at pictures and part numbers listed on Alibaba that only there was a difference in the placement of either the light and/or ejection hole between the UJDA760 and earlier and the UJDA770 and later. I don't know how accurate that conclusion was at the time - I never owned a UJDA770 to check. But if my research was right, then the faceplates on the UJDA740, UJDA750, and UJDA760 are all identical and should be swappable in a way similar to the one shown on the page I linked to above. But for the UJDA770, your light or emergency eject button (the one you use to stick a paper clip in when it is stuck) won't work without some modification. And there is no guarantee that you can even affix the 770 faceplate to the front of the UJDA770 drive - maybe you can, maybe you can't. You can always just leave the original faceplate and that will work fine. It just won't look as nice, and there might be a gap around the edge of the faceplate.

[pkiff]

[...] there is the region setting thing that's not supported on this early DVD drive and as such the DRM prevents the disc from being played on this DVD drive short of mods to your media players.

I recall running into a bunch of weird region setting issues with that era of drive, and I'm not sure I ever understood what was going on. In some cases, there was software that you needed to run to "set" the region on first play, but as you say, the software was so crappy that it wouldn't always work. And I recall the region setting breaking again when I tried to move from Windows 98 to XP. It was very frustrating!

[kfzhu1229]

Btw, if functionality is the only thing you want, you are also able to use a Ultraslimbay and ultrabay 2000 DVD drive as the physical interface between Ultrabay II and the latter 2 are completely electrically compatible. I know because I tested the DVD drive from my dead 770ED on a bare ThinkPad A31p motherboard and it worked just fine.
But well the giant hole from the size difference might make it non-practical.

[NathanA]

[...] there is the region setting thing that's not supported on this early DVD drive and as such the DRM prevents the disc from being played on this DVD drive short of mods to your media players.

I recall running into a bunch of weird region setting issues with that era of drive, and I'm not sure I ever understood what was going on. In some cases, there was software that you needed to run to "set" the region on first play, but as you say, the software was so crappy that it wouldn't always work. And I recall the region setting breaking again when I tried to move from Windows 98 to XP. It was very frustrating!

I played commercial Hollywood DRM'd movies on my 770 all the time back in the day (using the hardware MPEG2 decoder of course). No problems. You should probably Google and read up on RPC-I vs. RPC-II DVD drives. The official IBM FRU drives for these machines, being first-generation DVD drives, were RPC-I. So the DVD drive itself did no region enforcement...that was ALL done in software. Later RPC-II drives **DID** enforce region playback in the hardware itself.

[...] I don't have an external floppy for this machine (the one I had couldn't read any disks), but a replacement is on the way, and I'll use that when testing.

Any chance you might be willing to let your defective 770 floppy drive go for $cheap$? I need a dead one, because I'm going to be taking it apart and gutting it anyway. And I'd rather not sacrifice a perfectly working drive if I don't have to...

[Edward Mendelson]

Any chance you might be willing to let your defective 770 floppy drive go for $cheap$? :wink: I need a dead one, because I'm going to be taking it apart and gutting it anyway. And I'd rather not sacrifice a perfectly working drive if I don't have to...

I would be glad to pay you to take it off my hands, but I already dumped it in the real-world recycle bin. Sorry!!!

[pkiff]

[....] You should probably Google and read up on RPC-I vs. RPC-II DVD drives. The official IBM FRU drives for these machines, being first-generation DVD drives, were RPC-I. So the DVD drive itself did no region enforcement...that was ALL done in software. Later RPC-II drives **DID** enforce region playback in the hardware itself.

Oh right. I'd forgotten all about RPC-I and RPC-II!