Hypothetically, yes, but you'd need some sort of interface to convert the IDE interface of the drive into one of the external interfaces available on the PC. If you look at the external CDROM drives, you'll see that the drive itself is identical to an internal drive.
Yes, I have noticed the similarities. I once had an external drive attached to a system (an old laptop). When the external died, I opened the case and discovered that the external drive looks much like an internal, and that the drive itself was connected to a card which formed the parallel port. I connected an internal to the card to see if the system (Win 95) would recognize it, without any luck. I wondered if it did not recognize it because I had installed incorrect device drivers and have since installed various drivers. Again no luck. I, wrongly, assumed that the card port would make possible the conversion so that the system would recognize it as an external. I've heard talk of conversion kits(?).
I, now, understand what you mean. I have finally been able to do the same thing with the same-backpack cdrom. I simply needed to install the correct drivers. I did so with cdblazer.exe. My problem now is with the audio drive-ESS ES1688 Plug and Play AudioDrive is exclamation marked in device manager. This time the problem is not a question of device drivers. 'The device is not working properly or is not present.' Have tried to install 'Belarc Advisor" to get system information but it repeatedly fails to download a .dll file. Have gone into microsoft's knowledge base but their remedies did not remedy. As to learning how the system works, I've learned much by being problemed(?) much. Will keep working on it.
If your using the backpack case you'll probably have to get the backpack drivers as they are proprietary to the interface in the external case that connects to the parrellel port on your computer. Alot of those cases had interfaces with the sound card integrated with the interface and the driver for a similar sound card will not work. Also, those integrated sound cards do not support midi, they are just basic sound devices, and the older ones dont really support EIDE drives.I found on my external the interface doesn't communicate well with drives over 24X.
I've communicated with the manufacturers of the cdrom backpack. They insist that the necessary drivers are included in Microsoft Windows systems. That the backpack does not have proprietary drivers. That they have no drivers to offer. At first the lappy would not recognize the cdrom drive. Got the drivers from driverguide.com, problem resolved. Then the sound, video, and game controllers were xed out on device manager. Now, it has both identified the drivers needed and installed them, problem corrected. But no sound. I get sound from the labtop itslelf, but not from the cdrom. The tray (backpack) the new cdrom is attached to is the one the original cdrom (a much slower reader) was connected to. The labtop correctly identifies the IDE cdrom now, it plays VCDs, but no sound. I am able to install, very very slowly, games and play, but no sound. It really doesn't help that the labtop itself is ancient-Compaq WIN95, 1.36G Hard Drive, 120Mghz Intel Pentium, 32Mgbs of memory. I just want to get a system going on which my partner could play games and stop messing, and messing up my desktop.
there's an audio cable also in that backpack case. You sure it hooked up too ?? It connects right next to the data cable inside the case, just like it would in a pc. The backpack people told me the data rate on the parellel port backpack is like 256k per second...extremely slow by todays standards. It's really unusable for anything more than installing software. You can play cd's on it but you must have the backpack sound working and use the audio jack on the drive. Your laptop is about what I use with my backpack and it works ok. I can send you all the drivers if you need em. There's a dos driver pack, and a windows (pnp) version. The win version should autodetect the drive when you power up but the drive has to be powered on before the computer.
