[ltp] (a bit off-topic) strange behaviour after ultrabaying CDRW drive

[André Wyrwa]

Hi,

this is a bit off topic, but I don't want to subscribe to the Thinkpad
list, just for this question...and maybe someone can help.

First of all: This is a long long story and the problem is not the
problem itself, but the way the problem got solved.
And the whole thing is entirely based on my good trust in the "this will
work" directive, so I know that I don't have to wonder if I do what I'm
not supposed to do.
Did I finally make you curious? ;-)
Lets come to the point then:

I'm having a T23 and luckily got it with an UltraBay CDRW drive. I got a
T21 for a friend at the same time, unluckily without CDRW drive, but
with DVD drive.

She didn't need the DVD drive but wanted a CDRW. So I was watching eBay
for UltraBay CDRW drives, but they are quite rare and expensive.

Taking a closer look at my drive I dicided that it must be possible to
buy a TEAC CD-W28E (which is the actual drive within my UltraBay frame),
disassemble the UltraBay frame from the DVD drive and assemble it to the
new CDRW drive.

Thought and done, and it seemed to work for the first time (but you
should forget about this, since this remark makes things even stranger,
so we decided that our memories must be wrong).

However, after some days she called me to tell me that the drive doesn't
work and that it complained about "no medium in drive".
(We are talking about XP and the builtin burning feature here.) The
drive itself was recognised as writable, everything worked until the
final 'burn things to cd' assistant complained about the missing media.
(Of course there was blank media in the drive.)

I tried to mess around with the drivers a bit, deinstalled them,
reinstalled them, updated them...but it didn't help.

Then I decided to switch the drives. Did put mine into the T21 and hers
into my T23. And they both worked! Interesting point was that even
though the drives are identical (except for the frame) and the driver
for her drive was already installed, when inserting my drive XP bubbled
about new hardware again and started installing some stuff.

After switching back the drives suddenly also her drive worked in her
notebook.

The only theory I have come up with is that within the frame there must
be a kind of drive identifier and therefor XP must have thought the
drive still to be a DVD drive and not installed the writing part of the
drivers.

The complement experience to this theory is that after I assembled my
CDRWs frame to her old DVD drive and inserted it into my notebook, the
autostart window came up and offered me to launch my burning software,
and that even though there was NO media in the drive at all.

One more strange behaviour of her newly assembled drive is that it seems
not to like hot swapping. Or then hotswapping is possible, but the
ultrabay status led doesn't switch off on a swap request with this drive
inserted.

So...I'm just very curious...does someone know anything about the little
boards in the back part of the ultrabay frames? What do they do (except
forwarding the connections)? Are they universal or specific for
different drive types or models?

Any other explanations for this strange behaviour? (there were even more
strange things happening, but they might have different sources)

Regards,
André.