an odd computer question...

[Jacampb2]

Hey, I am working on all the garbage for my car-pc. Long story short, I bought several slot load dvd drives on ebay. All 50 pin SLIM IDE interface. I also ordered some external enclosures for the slim ide to usb bridge. Unfortunately, I can no longer use the USB, as I am going to be stuck with the V1.1 ports on the machine. I am out of PC Card slots, so no usb 2.0...

Anyhow, I dug around in my bin-o-crap and and found a usb/firewire ide bridge that came from a Sony DRX-830UL/T external dvd drive. Firewire would be perfect, since I have two available ports on the pc. Well, one of my slot drives came with a slim ide 50 pin to 40 pin IDE adapter board, so I started screwing around with this. Two of four drives are not recognizable by win XP or Win 7, they were both TEAC's, one of these drives turned out to be bad, the other is working fine in my laptop. One of the drives installed, but the eject button would not work, and when I tried "eject" from the control panel, windows said there was an error while trying to eject. One slot load drive installed, showing the model on USB, but here is the rub...

The slot stays in the "closed" position. Eject works, the slot gate opens and it tries to eject, but after it is done, it closes the gate again. I can sneak a disk in there between an eject push and the time the gate closes again, but basically it always acts like it is following a request to "close" the drive. I think that this might be normal behavior for a tray drive, but why does it do this via the adapter and bridge. I have had this drive in my laptop as well and it has none of the same problems.

So, is there a way to override this behavior? I'd be willing to try a more "universal" ide to firewire bridge, but I don't much want to dump money on it if it is going to be the same. I'm thinking this is some behavior specific to the bridge, since it is a propriety Sony controller. My USB--->50pin IDE enclosures should be here soon, so I guess I can test out whether this still happens on those on one of my desktop machines, but those use the slim 50 interface, so I'm skipping an adapter and that doesn't tell me whether it was the bridge or the interface...

Anyone have any advice?

Thanks,
Jason

[Jacampb2]

Well, the drives work perfectly in the external cases I bought, these cases are USB bridge-->50 pin IDE directly, I sure wish I knew if a standard IDE bridge for a dime a dozen HD case would work with the slim IDE drives... It seems all that I can find in ieee 1394 is the firewire to 40 or 44 pin IDE cards, I guess I am going to have to order one and give it a shot...

Later,
Jason