I have an Aptiva with a CD-ROM drive. Can I replace the drive with a rewritable drive? How about a DVD drive. Could I leave the present drive and just add another instead of replacing it? Am I asking for trouble?
The simple answers are yes, yes, yes, and not necessarily
I think adding or replacing a CDROM drive is fairly easy to do... The simplest thing to do would be to replace the CDROM drive with a CDRW or a DVD drive. Its usually as simple as plugging it in and installing some software...
Adding another drive is sometimes a little harder. But if you have any problems, the people here would be glad to walk you through it when you decide to purchase something!
It would help to know more about your system. Such as Motherboard and what you are running like How many hard drives. Are there more than one ide Channel??
Have you had the case open and are the hard drive and cd rom on the same cable or on different cables?? If you have a cable for each, If there are 2 cables, you would be able to add both a cd-r and dvd drive fairly easy.
The system is about 4 years old. There is one hard drive, but I am going to add a second soon. The existing hard drive and the CDROM are on separate ide cables. Not being overly smart about these tnings, I wondered if there are any limitations I should worry about.
From what you said, I gather that just adding a dvd or cdrw would be no more difficult than adding the hard drive. Is that a valid assumption? I presume the new hard drive would go on the cable to the existing drive, and a new cdrw or dvd would pair up with the existing CDROM
Adding a cd-r or dvd can be and usually is a very simple process. If you plan on adding a second hard drive I would add the cd-r or dvd on to the cable that already had the cd on it. As an add on you would need to set the new one to slave (a jumper on back of drive) and make sure the bios set to detect it.
Thanks for the suggestions and info. Maybe it is not important, but should I be concerned that my processor is an AMD K-5 running at 233 Mhz? If not, I will go ahead with the project, and thank you all very much.
I think I will just add a second hard drive, and replace the cdrom with a cd-r. I don't think that will overload the power supply, since the user's manual says that empty bays have been provided for an additional drive.
This is a great board. Thanks to all for your help.
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