This is almost too simple to warrant a mod guide, but in case there is anyone who isn't aware of it already, and since I have got the bug for writing mod guides at the moment. I'll just write this quick one.
The hot-swap drive modules in the Lombard and Pismo PowerBooks are great. The best thing about them is there are loads of drives you can fit in them.
The drive mechanism is the modern standard form factor for notebook optical drives. The new MacBook Pro uses a slightly slimmer version, but the late Titanium and all Aluminium G4s use the same form factor drives. So do most Wintel notebooks.
The actual work involved is trivial. There are four small black screws to remove, two each side of the drive module. The drive mechanism will then slide out leaving an empty plastic chassis with a small, thin circuit board in the end. Its really just a glorified adaptor.
Then you simply slide the new drive in, replace the screws and pop it in your PowerBook.
The most important part is probably choosing your new drive. The key here is the drivers. All optical ROM drives will run on the standard Apple drivers. So you can put any DVD-ROM in, and it will read DVDs just fine (Note: the 333MHz Lombard will need a PCMCIA DVD decoder card to play movies, and all Lombards are restricted to playing movies in OS 8 or 9. Unless you can get VLC to run watchably. Lombards can read data DVDs just fine though in X.)
Burners need to be supported by other drivers in order to actually burn anything, though they will happily read discs using the standard drivers.
There is a number of ways to persuade a burner to burn under OS X. Drives which were shipped in any model of Mac should have 100% functionality, meaning they will burn from Finder, Disk Utility, iTunes, iPhoto and iDVD (where applicable). If you get a drive from another Mac, it should be fine. If you get a PC drive the same make and model as a drive which has been used in a Mac, there is a good chance it will also show up as a 'supported/shipped' drive in the System Profile.
Second, there are applications such as Toast, which will allow you to burn all sorts of formats, from the vast majority of drives. Toast will certainly operate more drives than OS X will on its own. It does not help your ability to burn from Apple apps.
Third, there is Patchburn. An excellent piece of software which hacks an OS X driver to run a different drive. After running Patchburn successfully and rebooting, you will see the drive is 'vendor supported' in the system profile.
This will allow the vast majority of burners to have at least some degree of functionality in OS X. I should stress that there will certainly be some drives which will not work at all. I don't know any examples, but Apple laptops typically use Matshita (aka Matsushita or Panasonic), Sony and I think some Pioneer drives. So these are pretty safe bets.
If you want more details than that, Sony CRX CD burners and combos, Matshita CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, CDRWs and UJ-815, 816, 825, 835 and 845 DVDRWs and Pioneer K0 series DVD-RWs have all been used in PowerBooks and iBooks by Apple.
There is one more thing you have to think about when upgrading your optical drive, the Master/Slave settings. PowerBooks usually have their HD and Optical on separate ATA busses, so the drive may need to be set to master in order to be bootable. iBooks typically share a bus between their drives, so check if the one you remove is a Master or a Slave. You can do this from the system profile (Device 0 is Maser, 1 is Slave), or check to see if the HD has a small jumper on it. If the jumper is there, the HD is the Slave, so the Optical must be Master.
Many notebook optical drives do not have obvious ways to change between the two. Some have internal switches, others must be soldered. So take care when choosing a PC drive.
The best way to be sure you can get a drive to work before you buy it, is to check the drive compatability database at XLR8yourmac.com. Remeber if it works in one Mac, it should work just as well in another if running the same OS.
I have upgraded my own optical drive several time. I had an IBM CD-RW, which burned but did not boot, a Matshita DVD-ROM which did boot, and my 333MHz Lombard is currently running a slot-load Panasonic branded UJ-815 DVD-RW. I should point out that my Lombard has never successfully burned a DVD. I think its too slow, and drains its buffer. It burns CDs just fine though, and has been flashed with region free Mac firmware, which I was fortunate enough to have custom made for me.
That ended up alot longer than I thought it was going to be. Hopefully that means I covered it all.
http://patchburn.de
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