[PLUG-TALK] Safely testing a DVD Burner

Richard C. Steffens rsteff at comcast.net
Tue May 29 16:27:47 UTC 2012


Several weeks ago we awoke to the smell of ozone and other nasty stuff 
that turned out to be my wife's computer. The hard drive was fried, 
along with the motherboard. She now has a nice new Lenovo and I have her 
old case out in the shop. Today's question:

Is it safe to connect the DVD burner from her old machine to my desktop? 
I have a CD burner and a DVD reader in my desktop and would like to swap 
out the DVD reader for her old DVD burner. But, if the frying experience 
her old machine went through is likely to have done something to that 
DVD burner that, when put into another box, would damage that box, then 
I don't want to try it.

Is there some way to test it? I have another box with no hard drive, and 
not enough memory to support Linux if it did have a hard drive. If I put 
the old burner in there and looked at it with the BIOS, would that tell 
me if it's safe to connect to another box?

Thanks for your thoughts, warnings, observations that DVD burners are 
cheap so why take the risk?

-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens





More information about the PLUG-talk mailing list