We have a few bare USB IDE and SATA adapters kicking around the apartment here, they are indeed handy to have, if a bit fragile.

Wow, I don’t know why I didn’t think of that. Gonna have to try this since not having an optical drive can be a pain.

I also tried this with the boards from several enclosures I had at hand. However in my case the dvd drive was not recognized. I must have had bad luck :(

yea this is not that new of an idea, I saw someone doing it in a shop years ago and I have been doing it so long I have no idea where my enclosures actually are (if i didn’t throw them away in the move)

oh well, if you didn’t know you do now

looks alot better with a slimline CD/DVD.

either a server 50pin slimline to 40 for fullsize adaptors, or a mac 50pin to 44 for 2.5 ide adaptors.

External cases are designed for this. That’s why they’re 5 1/4″ bays.

I don’t understand this one at all. What connector and why it wouldn’t be recognized if it’s made for this specific purpose… O_o

I’ve been using something like this for a while… makes burning stuff easy as well as recovering data from a dead pc.

Unetbootin is easy to use though, so the need for a plug in burner isn’t as key. It does have issues at time with some distros… usually end up doing it manually with syslinux

Who the fuck do you think is reading hackaday? My grandpa?

I have to do this all the time. This is hardly any type of hack.

If you guys consider that a hack, how about this. Now use that stupid IDE to USB connector to connect up to an infected hard drive and load VM with many different virus scanners all on a different VM and scan with each to clear out the infection.

Still not a hack, but more of a hack than the original topic.

you probably didn’t think of it cuz you had 10 bucks to buy the one that did ide, sata and notebook sized ide. This isn’t a hack…this is just repurposed hardware…not changing a thing of how the usb connector works.

I don’t think this is a hack. Those adapters have an IDE connector, so does a cd-drive. It’s common sense really lol.

osgeld-
don’t use poison ivy as toilet paper.

I do this all the time, in fact if an external hard drive is the same price as an internal one of the same size, I’ll buy the external one and gut it for the converter. I don’t consider this a hack myself, but I’m not going to complain about bringing this option to people who hadn’t thought of it. btw I have an arduino and it blinks an led, what’s so bad about that?

Wow. Maybe it is just because I work in the computer field, but I read this thinking it was painfully obvious. Like Drusso said, IDE (Parallel ATA) drives, whether CD ROM or Hard Disk, have always used the same connectors, what would make a hard drive any different than the CD drive?

Well duuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhh………

Slow news day hackaday? Seriously now you call this a hack?

Speaking of hacks….. I know a bunch….

“osgeld-
don’t use poison ivy as toilet paper.”

Oh GREAT now you tell me

Like many others already said: I think a few people already thought about this…

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=usb+ide+adapter&x=0&y=0

Oh well, I suppose if you want to ruin a perfectly good enclosure to make an external USB to IDE adapter…

===Jac

“I suppose if you want to ruin a perfectly good enclosure to make an external USB to IDE adapter…”

depends, I know the last one I got was so cheap (10 bucks) and so poorly designed (you couldnt put a 3.5 inch drive in a box labeled 3.5 inches)that I didn’t care

Don’t know why did you guys posted this.
First time I see a unworthy post in HackaDay… :(

to give it hack-cred: the board I pulled from my 3.5″ external HDD (which worked perfectly with the SATA-DVD drive) actually has the ability to do eSATA, it looks like you just need to solder the connector (usually a through hole part, easy)

yep, that’s how my old laptop reads dvds.
like nicholas said: not all chips used in external enclosures will necessarily work. some may only somehow work: ok for reading but watch for buffer underrun while burning.
your dvd won’t fit in the old enclosure, but an old external scsi-case will do.

It would be cool if you could just add an IDE cable to an existing enclosure and use the CD as the secondary device :)

On a side note, when will we get thumb drives that act like bootable CD drives? I hate burning CD’s for no reason.

Even better if it was a SATA/USB thumb drive.

lot’s of comments in here, probably because anyone who is even remotely into computers, has an ide,pata,sata adapter. they are cheap and more reliable. raise your hands if you have more than one. (raises hand)

I did that for my EEE PC 701, used it to install windows and other software easily.

Are you kidding me?

Next can we post my hack where I plugged an optical drive into an IDE cable where a hard drive used to have been? Hint: that works too.

Jesus hell.

hey, i gots a 4 port KVM I HACKS GOOD

A chimpanzee stacking crates on top of one another to reach the banana tied to a string is more hack-worthy than this.

:facepalm: x 1,000,000

Preaching to the choir, but this ain’t new…It’s only unknown because it’s so simple – nobody who’s tried it has reported it simply because they figure it’s been done before.

…I personally prefer the ~$5 hong-kong special adapters, I’ve yet to have a compatibility issue with any of several brands. Then only issue I’ve encountered was with one particular DVD drive (all cd-rom drives that I’ve tested worked) that would be recognized at boot on a thinkpad, but then locked up and refused to read properly after several minutes…It worked fine when used “properly,” the converter just didn’t like it…

Been there done that. How is this not obvious?

Are you serious? This is the most obvious thing ever.

Oldie but a goodie… I’ve done the reverse also, ripped a dvd burner out of it’s usb enclosure to put a hdd in temporarilly…

Yes I know, it’s not a hack. Merely trivial to make ends meet and I’ve been running this for years. BUT it doesn’t bring the writeup justice if there isn’t a link to it! So, here it is: http://ubermodder.com/usb-ide-hdd-to-cd-dvd-drive-conversio/

cath0de-
“whatever guys. read the post or don’t.”

Quit yer whining. Read the comments or don’t.

seriously? I think my soul just shriveled a little bit.

I’m not one to jump on the “not a hack” bandwagon but… really? Using an IDE to USB adapter to use… AN IDE ODD IN USB? :O!!! That is magic!

I don’t even think this is clever or anything. If you think this is a hack because they repurposed a 3.5″ enclosure… man I’m hacking a damn lot while building computers. I’ve used a box once to sit my motherboard on for testing…

And now ripley believe it or not will announce the winner of 2010 for scoring highest in category “The most technology illiterate”. The medal goes toooo!… Mike !!! Lady and genteelness what a touching moment, look the tear of joy

By the way here is “why didn’t I think of that?” idea, you can use tobacco pipe to smoke weed! no more wasting time on rolling joints, just pick up pie at any grocery store

This is dumb HaD. Why did you post this? You can buy bare-board USB/IDE or SATA converters for next to nothing, no need to strip one out of a perfectly good HDD enclosure. Even baby “hackers” have done this.

BOOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and my inbox kills me in a horrible glass shattered sheared metal sort of way.

i cleaned something other than glass with glass cleaner… can you post an article if i write it up?

this is silly

“This will prove extremely handy if you have a netbook without an optical drive.”

Are you f-king kidding me?

I do have a netbook without an optical drive, and instead of ripping two perfectly good drives to pieces, I just went out and spend £20 on a USB DVDR/CDRW drive which is perfectly designed to fit in my netbook bag.

This is not a hack. If you know the ATA standards, you’d see that ATA Packet Interface (ATAPI) is just the same as the IDE for hard drive.

I use this with Wxripper to backup my xbox 360 games. Just unscrew the chassis and you can easily swap the movie dvd after finding the magic number. The only downside would be that it takes about 1min to make the drive stop spinning via usb. Other than that… its perfect. Even got a name for it: The ripbox.

i’ve done this around hundred times with different adaptors… it works as well with sata-to-ide-ide-to-usb or somewhat. this is lame

tomorrow: how to connect a usb mouse to ps/2 via usb-to-ps/2 adaptor

Hack a day Fail …

like the name of an mp3 encoder….
lame…
i think you’re getting more dude! wtf?! responses than a cheers, publishing very common (i might even say household grandma in the kitchen style) sense ususallly gets these kinds of replies..
been there, done that (also with a crappy parallel interface ), like most of the posters here…

@nubie:

“On a side note, when will we get thumb drives that act like bootable CD drives? I hate burning CD’s for no reason. ”

Also already done: Just get a U3 drive and put your own ISO on it with U3 Customizer. U3 sticks emulate a USB CD-ROM drive and a mass storage device.

I use a U3 stick all the time to reinstall Windows XP on test computers: While many motherboards have trouble booting from USB memory sticks, most will boot from the emulated CD-ROM. Also, while it’s impossible to install Windows from a USB CD-ROM if you use the XP ISO, it’s possible to boot WinPE or BartPE from CD-ROM and start the XP installer from there.

Booting WinPE takes a minute or so depending on the motherboard, and installing XP Pro from a directory on the mass storage part of the U3 stick takes about 10 minutes with /makelocalsource. All you need to know is how to Google for “WAIK” and “winnt32 command line”.

===Jac

Grow up. They didn’t buy new hardware, they reused stuff, they DID IT THEMSELVES. Their hardware did not come out of the box like this, they had to hack it up.

Nerds stop fronting and do something.