Endless Paradigm

I've been given a laptop to repair by a colleague in work. It's a Toshiba Qosmio G30 (absoloute beast in its day.) He was having some trouble re-installing XP after he broke it a bit.

So here's the problem. The laptop's original DVD drive is broken. So, he thought, just get a replacement off eBay (Optiarc AD-7530B). Fitted fine but on startup the laptop will POST but then give an error message saying "CD-ROM Error". Many hours later after digging through many Google search results I've come to the conclusion that the drive needs to be set as a slave for this particular laptop (most laptops will accept master, slave or CS.) Being a slimline drive there are no jumpers on the rear of the drive for setting this.

So many more google searches later I discovered that to change the drive's master/slave settings you had to use a software tool. I can find one for the AD-7350A but not the AD-7350B. Does anyone know of a tool that is able to change this drive's settings?

I've tried putting this drive into my laptop (which recognizes it fine with everything working perfectly) and running the software tool for the AD-7350A but that errored out telling me that the drive was unsupported. I'm really at a loss here. The only solution I can think of is to buy another drive that comes pre-set as a slave.


On another note:
My first thought was to install XP from a USB drive just to get the thing going but the BIOS is so old it doesn't support booting from USB. The BIOS can only be updated from within XP. As far as I can tell there isn't a bootable floppy version which would make sense seeing as the laptop doesn't have a floppy drive.

Hi
    It does sound like the drive is faulty, but try removing the drive from the laptop. There should be an eject mechanism on the bottom right of the drive - Push this in to release the handle, then pull the drive out of the laptop. Check that the contacts are not damaged/dirty and then replace the drive, pushing the handle back in once the drive is back in place.

You say you've tried three different DVD's then say two DVDs aren't up to date. Do you mean DVD disks or DVD Drives?

Right. The laptop's gone back now to it's owner. I've tried 3 differrent DVD drives in it. 1 I know to be faulty (I tried it in my laptop, recognised it's existence but it wouldn't spin up), the second I know to work (tried in my laptop, worked perfectly), the third is my laptop's original DVD drive (which works perfectly albeit a little noisy). After many hours of Googling I came to the conclusion that the replacement drives that the guy bought simply do not work with his laptop. His laptop requires the DVD drive to be set to Slave. The drives he bought are set to Master and cannot be changed. Most drives can be changed with a software tool but not these drives. I've given the whole lot back to him and told him to look for a drive that either comes pre-set to Slave or can be changed with a software tool.

Also one more thing, the eject mechanism you mentioned is for recovering a disc if the drive fails. It only opens the drawer and not the entire drive. It took me a while to work it out but my laptop's drive is released by removing the RAM cover and undoing a silver screw (all the other screws are black.) The drive will then push out.

Thanks for your reply anyway.