Removing dvd drive
 

My friends friend just gave him a 2 year old dell dimension 4100. He wants to put the dvd drive into his brand new HP Pavillion a1203w. Will the dell drive be compatible. Also, he cant get the dvd drive out of the dell. Is there anyway to get it out.

yes
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thanks for the intelligent comment. Its ashame that everyone's not computer savvy, huh?

Yeah. Getting drives out of retail machines can really be a pain in the ass. The main reason for this is the enormous bezel that tends to be put on the front. If the Dell is like others I've worked on, you need to pull off the side panel (usually just a lever, sometimes a thumbscrew as well) then there are buttons to be pressed on the inside. One is on the inside right wall of the case, and one is somewhere near the top, behind the optical drives.

Once you get the bezel off, getting the drives out is a piece of cake. Unhook the power cable and the ATA cable (usually a ribbon cable about two inches wide), unscrew the screws on the visible side (if there are any), or just depress the lever (if it's a screwless design) and slide the drive out the front of the compy. Reverse that process for the new machine, then let Windows XP do its magic (i.e. auto-detect and install the new drive).

Unless you're trying to move a full-size drive to a laptop, or maybe a SCSI or SATA drive to something that doesn't have the interface, it's all fairly standard stuff. Remember neither Dell nor HP make the parts. The only obstacle you should encounter would be setting master/slave relations so the drives cooperate. Case disassembly might be tricky but there's always a procedure. Check around for what to press and in what order for each model.

Sorry, I meant to remove my first post because it was not useful.
Seems I did it wrong and ended up with two useless posts...make that three.