I have a DVD burner now and I don’t need my CD burner. What all do I need to do to install my DVD burner? Is it as simple as taking the plug from the power supply to the CD burner and putting that in the DVD burner instead or do I need to set up the DVD burner first by manipulating pin settings or something? I wont be doing this for a week since my computer isn’t here but I’d like a general idea of how to do it.
Assuming you’re running Windows, “remove” the device from the Device Manager. Turn off the computer. Swap the drives. Turn on the computer. It should recognize the new drive. If not, use the install disk that came with the new unit.
I’ve done this several times this way.
You might need to adjust a jumper on the drive indicating whether it’s master or slave on that particular IDE cable, or if your PC uses what’s called “cable select” where the particular plug on the cable is defining master/slave.
Just pull out the old drive and look at its jumper. It’s an itty-bitty black nub connected across two of (typically) eight pins next to the cable connector. There should be a label on the drive either right above the jumper, or on top, translating the jumper postions - whatever the existing position is described as is what you want to set the new drive to. The particular physical positioning will not necessarily be the same, which is why you need to check the lable and do a little translation.
If you goof the jumpering, no harm will happen other than the PC may put up an error message when you turn it on, or the drive simply won’t work.
When I go into device manager do I update, uninstall or disable my old CD-R drive before I put the DVD drive in? I assume disable, but if something goes wrong I do not have the CD for this drive to reinstall it.
Remove it.
If you should have to reinstall it, Windows has the drivers it needs for it.
Generally, these kinds of drives will basically be automatically detected by windows, and you wont’ have any kind of problems like that. I’ve replaced DVD/CD Burners many times, and I’ve never removed the old one from the Device list, and it always turns out okay. Ditto on the jumper settings, though. Just look at the drive and set the new one to that. Its probably set to Slave or Cable Select. Just hook that up, and you should be in business. I’ve never heard of a drive requiring proprietary software to be able to read a CD.
Just a thought, if you only have one optical drive in the system, keep the CDburner and install the DVDRW as well…most systems can handle 4 IDE devices (hard disk drives, cdroms, ect…) It makes stuff much easier if you have 2 drives (DVD reader/DVDRW is the best combination)
I’m with kinoons. Unless your CD burner is pretty old, it will probably have better CD burning performance than a DVD burner. It is also often handy to have two drives.