External CD Drives
FrankPR got an external DVD burner. We got a whole bunch of these at school, and having an external CD Burner, and an external DVD burner got really annoying really quick when I had 5.25” bays free in my tower. So, here's a dongle reduction tip:
Those External drive sleds that usually tack $50 onto the price - they have a little board in the back with an IDE widget that converts the IDE cable into USB. The actual drive is the exact same thing as you would buy for internal. So, if you've got an external drive and you use it with a machine which has a free 5.25” bay, you can just slide the thing in, and lose the sled.
Here's the process in it's entirety: Take all the bolts and excess plastic off the sled - the Backpack ones we have come with some really annoying plastic. My backpack ones have these locking plastic clips inside. If you're planning to maybe put the drive back int he sled, you'll have to be careful not to break the things - they're irreparable. I just busted them off on the ones I took apart at school, but I never planned to use the sled again.
Once you've got the drive out of the sled, get a pair of forceps or needle nose pliers, and put the master/slave jumper in the proper place. Here's my general approach to where to put it:
If I already have a CD drive of some denomination, and I'm planning to use the combination for writing, I put one drive on each IDE channel to prevent buffer overflows. So, make the new drive a slave to the HDD and put the other drive on channel 2 as a master, or vice versa. If you change the current CD drive to a slave, and make the new one a master, your drive letters may swap.
That's the long and short of it - Windows will recognize the drive without ay drivers (2000/XP/2003 at least), and you can use it like a normal drive. No mucking with extra drivers and such. You can pull this stunt with a SCSI drive (if you have one - haven't seen an external job in a while), it's a somewhat different procedure though.