IBM Thinkpad R31 CD-ROM drive replacement

The CD-ROM drive of my IBM Thinkpad R31 was broken for a very long time. Wietze, a very friendly colleague this week was so kind to donate a replacement drive. The replacement job took about 20 minutes.

The most challenging part turned out to be the front cover of the CD drive. The front cover of the IBM Thinkpad R31 CD-ROM drive is not square but the donated drive did had a square front.

After some puzzling it turned out that there are two screws to be removed. After that, a notch has to be pressed and with a little bit of kind persuasion the front comes off.

The screws to be removed:

The notch to be pressed:

Testing

After the replacement of the front the replacement drive was fitted into the R31 (just sliding in), it was time for the final test.

matto@r31:~$ dmesg | grep -i hdc
    ide1: BM-DMA at 0xa898-0xa89f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:pio
hdc: Compaq CRN-8245B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdc: attached ide-cdrom driver.
hdc: ATAPI 24X CD-ROM drive, 128kB Cache, DMA

That looks ok. Now see if we can read a CD:

matto@r31:~$ su -
Password:
root@r31:~# mount /dev/hdc /mnt
mount: block device /dev/hdc is write-protected, mounting read-only
root@r31:~# ls /mnt
ANNOUNCE.10_2      COPYING            FAQ.TXT       README.NPTL       SPEAK_INSTALL.TXT  kernels/
BOOTING.TXT        COPYRIGHT.TXT      FILELIST.TXT  README.TXT        Slackware-HOWTO    slackware/
CHECKSUMS.md5      CRYPTO_NOTICE.TXT  GPG-KEY       RELEASE_NOTES     UPGRADE.TXT
CHECKSUMS.md5.asc  ChangeLog.txt      PACKAGES.TXT  SPEAKUP_DOCS.TXT  isolinux/
root@r31:~# 

So we are happy again! Thanks a lot, Wietze!