Lately I’ve been experiencing various issues with my DVD rom drive. It wont be detected, it wont copy files, it wont read files, etc. Overall this has been pretty frustrating lately because i have had several important medias delivered by way of DVD. This has led to probably hours of struggling, and general cursing at this inanimate object. Then, for some reason – at 12.30 a.m. on Friday (technically Saturday) – I decided to finally BRB this drive, seen here:

After BRBing this hidous piece of equipment (note, never buy “Liteon” product). I then set my task of making my external DVD RW/Cd RW drive work on my computer. First, a flashBack: for Christmas this past year, i purchased my father a nice new shiny DVD writer. A Pioneer, I believe… Part of that Christmas present to him meant that I got to take his old DVD RW drive, an external usb2 device, and claimed it as mine own. Now… finally… 5 months later… I tried hooking it up.

With the ease of installation and configuration on Ubuntu 7.04, i figured this to be a plug and play operation. Pretty much Neg. This external drive did not even get detected. I went at it pretty hard for about an hour, and finally gave up. I had surrendered all hope and succumbed to the fact that i would just buy a new DVD drive, an INTERNAL DVD drive. Then, at that exact moment, the fires that forged mickeyvb churned with a breath of fresh oxygen and took over my being. I began dismantling the external DVD drive. I detached cables. I took out about a dozen screws. I cracked and pryed the plastic shell. Pieces and parts flew. And after about 20 minutes of sodomizing this external drive, i was left with an internal drive (right) and some trash (left):

That shell looks alot worse in person, and there are many more parts to it not shown. After all this was said and done, this drive fit perfectly and worked perfectly like any other INTERNAL drive. It was a fantastic moral victory, and so i am no longer in need of any DVD drive. Although this one only writes at 8x – it will do. 🙂 Now i can concentrate on the AVIC D3 and a new Digicam.

In closing, here is a picture of my gato – she pawed at screws and sniffed things. Obviously trying to help me in my endeavors, but not possessing any opposable digits, she failed to provide any adequate assistance.