Dell :: New DVD Drive Won't Detect/read 9400/E1705
Oct 10, 2007
I have a Dell 17inch E1705/9400 notebook and Vista home. I recently purchased a [url]Samsung DVD burner. I replaced the stock one, and once I turned the computer on the OS does not detect the new drive at all . The drive will not open when the button is pressed, but the power (reading?) light is on ALL the time. I do not hear the drive making any noise, only at startup.
I have a Dell E1705 / 9400. I want to upgrade RAM. Currenly i have 2 * 1GB 667 MHZ RAM. I want to upgrade to 4GB. Will my laptop support. I want to upgrade to maximum frequency ram. 800 Mhz or more. If its available.
2.13 core 2 duo, 2gig ram, 100gig 7200 rpm hd, 1920x1600 true life screen, 7800go gfx which I purchased in June 2006. I am in the UK so this cost me £1100 from the Dell outlet.
During December 2007 it has had 4 service calls where the motherboard, graphics card, and lcd have been changed 4 times with the same fault occurring (lines on lcd).
Dell have kindly agreed at my request to swap the laptop for a new 9400, but as the 9400 is no longer in production Dell said they will give me a similar spec 1720 instead, which was nice of them and I agreed. Here is the spec for the 1720:
All seemed fine but slower hd which I can live with (just about).
I then started doing some research and discovered the 8600 is slower than the 7800 I had? and the laptop has no DVI port! I used to connect the 9400 to my external montior and sometimes my HD TV using the DVI and will miss it dearly on the 1720.
Would it be unreasonable for me to ask for a higher spec machine over the 1720?
I'm attempting to upgrade my wife's 9400/e1705 but it's been so long since I gave a damn about mobile CPU's that I've forgotten which ones will fit and which ones won't.
I know she has a core solo 1.66 yonah, and I know it can fit certain T1** and T2**, and I know there's a screaming fast one out there, but I don't want to buy the wrong thing.
My friend just told me he heard this was true. Can anyone confirm? I know there are 2 different brands of LCDs floating around in the E1705/9400. A Samsung model, and a Phillips. However he claimed that the M1710 used one different than the E1705/9400, and was a blazing 30% brighter.
can I upgrade to pc2-5300 ddr2-667 with my current possessor also taking into consideration that i mite upgrade the cpu some day
How much ram can the Inspiron handle with the latest bios update will i need a new psu to power such upgrades feel free to fill me in on anything i'm missing here
I'm looking at some Mushkin pc2-5300 ddr2-667 2 x 1gb
Is all or most 5300 667 supported by newest bios I found cheap ram made for imac can i use mac ram in a dell
1) I'm ordering in a FX2500 to replace my 7800 go. I'm currently using Extreme-G Mobileforce driver 92.91 (I've tried some of the newer versions but prefer this one). Will this driver be compatible with the FX2500?
2) What are the best drivers for the FX2500 if not Mobileforce?
3) Overclocking... I've read the posts about flashing the 7900GTX bios to enable overclocking, does this mean i cannot overclock using the normal software way. In the Mobileforce drivers for the 7800, the option is in the Advanced Settings options in Windows. Does the FX2500/7950GTX not have this option and is BIOS flashing the only way to overclock the card?
4) If the BIOS flash is to enable voltage adjustments as well as clock adjustments, is this something I need to do or will the card do well with just altered clock speeds?
I ran Win7's Upgrade Advisor and got a couple flags on Inspiron 9400's hardware. But I've heard that people have nstalled Win7 on them (with mixed results).
A couple reports on graphics malfunctions, and someone said the Sigmatel drivers were not found.
I wouldn't bother, but I have a couple development projects that require Win7.
Wondering if anyone has had good luck with Win7, and whether there are certain things to watch out for. All drivers work OK? Did you install 32-bit or 64-bit?
My Inspiron 9400/E1705 case is getting a little banged up and I was wondering if it's possible to use a M1705 case (bezel, palmrest, base, etc). as a replacement.
I got a Dell Inspiron 9400/E1705 here that will not boot. The owner said he put into hibernate and went home, when he came in and turned it back on it was sluggish for about 10 minutes, he powered it off and then it would not power back up.
When you turn on the power the power and HD lights come on, you hear what sounds like the HD doing some movement and then it shuts down in a few seconds.
I removed the HD, ram, dvd, wifi, modem and tested it with same results. Also took out the CMOS battery to try to reset the BIOS and put it all back together and same thing.
CPU fan does not spin at all on power up, not sure if this model is supposed to do that little 5 second thing most of them do.
No beeps, nothing on the screen, etc.
Is there a way to determine if its the motherboard OR the video card, as this has a discrete video card, not integrated. Would you get any kind of system response if the video card was dead but the motherboard/cpu was ok ?. I would rather replace one and not both if I can tell which to go after first.
My 7950GTX failed and all replacement cards I've seen on Ebay, from the X1400, 7900GS or better are overpriced.
Since I won't be gaming with my laptop anymore, I was thinking of replacing my motherboard with the one with integrated onboard video, which is more cost effective.
Do you know if it fits, meaning will my current LCD connector fits this motherboard ? Should I expect a bad surprise?
It's been over two years since the last update, but Dell finally released a patch for the faulty nVidia graphics chips to help delay failure. That's the only fix listed in the A10 release. I wanted to let everyone know that if you have an nVidia graphics card in your E1705 or any other laptop from 2006-2008 you should check for the latest BIOS update because these cards have faulty thermal design that causes overheating and failure. The symptoms are odd colored pixels, video flickering, rebooting and system crashes, program crashes, odd lines on screen, etc - once you start to exerience this it's already too late, your chip is damaged and needs to be replaced. Likely, at this point, every system out there is probably already experiencing some form of failure so to be safe, if you're still under warranty, I'd use it to get a new card as soon as you can and apply this BIOS update. Anyway, you can find the BIOS update here:
I've been using the Windows Vista (32) that came with my Inspiron 9400, now I'm going to (thankfully) upgrade to Windows 7 x64 and I'd like to know if anybody know (had used/ tested/seen) what would be the best and great driver for this nVidia GeForce 7900GS on W7 64.
I looked over nVidia website and there is currently no certified driver for this card + Windows version, so for what I see, we'll have to go either laptopvideo2go and mobileForce,
Could a few technologists in the know give me a detailed rundown on the primary differences between the three nVidia card options for the E1705/9400?
I quickly replaced my original X1400 with a dual pipe 7900GS but I am now interested in either moving up to a 7900GTX or a 7950GTX. I know I will also need to upgrade to the 130W or 150W PS as well.
I am looking for comparison information regarding memory, clockspeeds, pipeline counts, pixel/vertex units, pixel/fill rates, processing bandwidth, etc.
I am also curious about a good source for the purchase of any of these items. I have found one posting on eBay for a 7950GTX. I am interested to know if I can purchase directly from Dell, or save a few bucks by purchasing from eBay or a forum member. I also know I have read that there are equivalent Quadro (sp?) cards which will work in my machine. Are there any disadvantages to taking this route?
I know I could dig through a thousand plus posts on the topics and find all of the information I want, but I also know how much you guys thrive on expressing your technical expertise on subjects such as this ..........................
Laptop was working fine with the factory Hitachi HTS541680J9AT00 80gb drive.
I purchased a Samsung HM160HC 160gb drive as it's supposed to be the fastest PATA laptop drive available.
I put it in and the laptop just kept saying "no operating system found" with the XP disk in the drive.
I tried several optical drives and got the same issue with all of them.
I then hooked a USB optical drive up and it wouldn't boot from it.
I removed the internal optical drive and the system then booted from the USB drive and loaded Windows fine.
I just assumed it was a fluke and once Windows was done loading I removed the USB drive, installed the factory internal optical again and turned it on...
"No operating system found".
This is where I'm stuck. If I remove the optical the system boots into Windows fine. There were no issues like this with the other hard drive.
I have tried setting the hard drive as Master, Slave, and Cable Select with no change.
Laptop has the newest BIOS.
Samsung does not offer firmware updates on their hard drives.
I ran the diagnostics tools and it failed to detect hard drive. I'm trying to use a usb OS but it fails to boot too. I tried tweaking the configs in the bios setup ( sata port, etc) , yet I cannot even use an external boot drive.
Dell XPS M1710. Phillips SDVD8820 DVD/CD RW Drive. Shows up in hardware manager, but all of a sudden, after writing a few discs in the morning, the drive just stopped being able to either read or write a CD.
I've tried reading both commercial audio CDs as well as audio CDs I've written on the system, and it just behaves as if there is no CD in the drive. Using iTunes, WMP, Media Monkey, and Nero 9...
When I stick a DVD in the drive and let Nero 9 check the drive out, it recognizes what type of drive it is, etc. But if I ask any of those apps to read or play a CD, they all say no CD is in the drive..
I got this Laptop with Ubuntu to dodge being locked into only having Vista and hit my head during many attempts to install Vista Home Premium SP1 64-Bit.
First problem is I keep getting a "can't use this volume" or "can't find volume suitable for Vista" during partitioning.
Got the Intel driver on a flash drive for it but not sure if I need the flash cache driver or not. Vista 32-Bit hung during setup so..
I tried a few days ago to watch some movies on my laptop but my disk driver couldn`t read my dvd´s at all. It can read CD´s but no DVD´s. This is my dvd driver:
PLDS DVD+-RW DC-8A2SH
My laptop is an Alienware M15X and I´m using Windows 7 (64bits)
I just bought a Touchsmart Envy 15-J117TX 2 days ago. I have a problem of connecting usb optical drive to my laptop.I don't know why DVD drive doesn't show in my computer!!! and in Device Manager, I cannot see DVD/CD-ROM drives?