In other news, the floppy drive died. The drive is an FDDASSY2. (What a fitting name! It is ass!) If anybody knows anything about toshiba's stupid freaking ancient laptop drives, please help!

Isn't that something like IBM's ultrabay? I've seen that type of connector for a lot of IDE devices for Toshiba, but I'm not sure of the name either.

Funny, I was talking with one of my friends about this, and he mentioned his IBM ThinkPad. I should shoot him back about this. Hopefully, this leads somewhere! 😁

Keep us posted. I'm curious myself.

AFAIK, that connector shouldn't be 'part' of the drive itself but something that interfaces a conventional slim cd/dvd IDE connector to whatever proprietary format Toshiba used for their laptop drive bays. If you open that case, there should be a conventional slimline ide cd drive inside which you should be able to replace with a slimline ide dvd drive.

Considering the sheer number of pins on that connector (~40 visible just on one side, so probably ~80 total), it may well route all the ide and all the fdc signals, along with extras for a secondary battery or whatever.

Uhh... there doesn't seem to be anywhere it WOULD open, besides the drive itself.

They can be a bit tricky. Care to post a full picture from different angles (rear, bottom, sides) instead of just a closeup of the connector? If I remember right, starting with the two Phillips screws on either side of the connector and a few clips in the plastic should do the trick.

Your drive probably looks somewhat like this, right?

If it does, then the entire plastic rectangle at the rear of the drive (right section in the picture) isn't actually part of the drive itself but contains the connector adapter board.

The CD drive itself is actually quite a bit 'shorter', like so:

Hmm... there is indeed some screws on a plastic part connected to the metal CD ROM. Unfortunately, the screws are extremely small. I'm not sure I have a screwdriver that can unscrew them. Will keep things updated.

Edit: Found one small enough for all but one of the screws, the one that goes in the hole on the top of the picture. Smaller than the others by a country mile. They obviously don't want people to be able to swap the drives.

Here's the problem screw, alongside the ones I got out, and a screw typical to a desktop case. As you can see, it's more than twice as big. A lot more.

Another update: I got all the screws off the floppy, and although there's plastic snaps holding it together still, there seems to be just a floppy drive internals in there. Well, I guess there's no laptop standard for floppies. So damn, looks like the floppy drive's some native strange crap anyway.

Man, all this posting is probably pissing someone off at this point. Do what you want with me! *AHEM*

Anyway, looks like that screw is actually part of the drive and not the caddy. I had missed two screws at one side, and I now have it off. BEHOLD THE NAKED CD DRIVE! It seems to look like typical IDE, mercifully.

georgeqgreg wrote:

Man, all this posting is probably pissing someone off at this point. Do what you want with me! *AHEM*

* Stiletto slaps georgeqgreg with a large trout. *

...

😉

georgeqgreg wrote:

Man, all this posting is probably pissing someone off at this point. Do what you want with me! *AHEM* […]
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Man, all this posting is probably pissing someone off at this point. Do what you want with me! *AHEM*

Anyway, looks like that screw is actually part of the drive and not the caddy. I had missed two screws at one side, and I now have it off. BEHOLD THE NAKED CD DRIVE! It seems to look like typical IDE, mercifully.

Quite precisely. You should be able to swap that with any other IDE CD/DVD drive and it should work (unless Toshiba had some kind of weird BIOS whitelist in place).

There are even hard drive caddies you could fit in there instead, for extra storage.

No idea if it would take a hard drive. I guess if I ever get ahold of one, we'll see! Now, about the floppy drive...

So I grabbed a slim DVD drive from a Dell that was in my school's garbage. Drive is a Phillips, forgot the model ATM, but will post it later. The drive works great in the laptop! It's very loud, but it reads CD-RWs and even DVD+RW! There's no writing capability, which is fine by me, because first of all, I think laptop DVD writers are one of the stupidiest things the manufacturers came up with, and second of all, the laptop is not nearly powerful enough! Further looking at photos reveals the floppy does come out of the caddy, but I've no idea how. If anyone knows, it would be nice if you could tell me. I actually found a slim floppy today, might manage to get it. Once I do, this laptop would be just about perfect except for lacking a gameport, but I think you'd need the dock for that! Unless, perhaps, there's a PCMCIA adapter out there?

Edit: Oh yeah, how could I forget? The bezel also doesn't fit in the caddy, so I had to pry it off so it would fit. Unfortunately, this means I can no longer press the eject button. Anyone know a good way to file plastic?

So I managed to get the floppy out of the caddy. It really wasn't easy! I wonder if you're not supposed to. Anyway, I think I damaged the mounting bracket getting it out. I also couldn't get the caddy open all the way. Those tabs were blocking me and I couldn't even get them off. Anyway, it's got the same connector as the slim floppy I saw earlier, so I'm gonna try to grab it.

Update: And for those who wanted to know what DVD drive I've got, it's a Phillips SDR089. Google seems to indicate that it's Dell OEM, and can be had for very cheap. Just remember the bezel is giant!

Ok, Windows 95 BSODS when any program tries to read from a CD. This could be a problem.

Try 98?

I'd rather not install a new OS without a working floppy! Also things seem to be working okish? now. Explorer seems to copy files ok, and I got a game to work.

Here's my conclusion on the new drive. Ok for file copies, but programs trying to read from it, like the way a game would, have big bag failures. Tried several windows games and typically get BSODs, also tried playing an MPG in Activemovie and that also caused BSODs, and I tried a DOS game (Gabriel Knight) and got DOS errors. I have no way of knowing if it's the drive's fault or if the laptop has a shitty IDE controller or what.