Toshiba laptop rom drive replacement

[allegedly]

I own a Toshiba Portege M300 laptop.

I need to replace the rom drive.

It is a 9.5mm IDE super slim type.

Unfortunately the drive requires special 'toshiba' firmware to work, as it needs to be set as a master or a slave (I'm not certain which from what I have read) instead of the common 'cable select' standard that most drives are set to.

So what I need to know is:
Does anyone know of any 9.5mm drives for which there is available firmware to set master/slave? - I can find some for standard 12.5mm drives, but not for any 9.5mm ones.

Do I need to set the drive to master or slave? And if so, could I do this by linking pins on the rom drive? 45 and 47 for master maybe? - I've done quite a bit of surface mount soldering so this kind of thing doesn't scare me, if it will do the job.

Toshiba will charge me over £100 for a replacement drive which won't even write DL - UJ822B with their own firmware - no other UJ822B will work....

Very grateful for any help.

Thanks

Paul.

 

[pcfixed]

you need the exact same drive, same brand, same design, same firmware from same model and same make. toshiba's old habbits....Ebay is the only place if you know what keywords to use

 

[allegedly]

Thanks for your response pcfixed - but I'm very happy to tell you that you are wrong.

I brought a cheap second hand UJ-852 9.5mm drive from ebay, which of course didn't work with the Toshiba M300. Because it was cheap I decided today that I had nothing to loose in soldering pin 47 to a ground pin to make it recognised as a master. And I was presently surprised to find that the M300 now recognises the drive fine!

For anyone interested; on the UJ-852 there were actually solder 'test-points' connected to pin 47 and ground, so I didn't even have to try to solder directly onto the connector itself.

The UJ-852 is a very similar drive to the UJ-822B original, so I'm not necessarily convinced that this approach will have equal success on all other 9.5mm ide drives, but it looks like 10 minutes with a soldering iron has saved me a lot of money.

Paul.