I have a Dell Latitude CPi, its CD-Rom can be hoohed to the parallel port with the cable that came with it, and can boot from that CD. Problem: CD-Rom won't read well enough any more to use a data CD, (music CD has lots of skips etc). I want to connect an internal IDE CD-Rom to this to get it to boot from a CD I have (I have some electronics background, if I have to, I can take the Dell's CD-Rom appart and solder connections in there). I can use a standard PC power supply to power the 4 pin power connector on the back of the drive, that won't be a problem. Any help appreciated.

There are currently a whole bunch of new, original Dell replacements on the web for your CDRom drive, such as here: http://search.ebay.com/dell-latitud... e.g. $26 plus $10 shipping USD. You could take apart the CDRom drive you have apart and if you are clever you may be able to figure out how to wire the IDE data cable on another drive to the wiring in the part that plugs into the laptop, and if you can do that you can probably figure out where to tap into the power connection as well via the part that plugs in. But to connect the power on the internal PC IDE CD drive to another power supply is not wise as you may be running into dire complications - you would at least have to ground the ground connections of the other power supply to the laptop power grounds in the existing adapter, or to somewhere else on the the laptop. You may need to open up the laptop. See the Parts removal and Replacement Guide here: http://support.dell.com/support/edo... If you were thinking you could run a modern IDE DVD burner drive, think again. - The software for burning DVDs requires huge amounts of free hard drive space which you probably do not have, and most specifies a 700mhz or faster cpu, minimum. Your cpu at 233mhz max just won't cut it. - the IDE controller on the laptop is probably not capable of supporting the faster mode a DVD burner requires - you may even have problems getting it to run a CD burner.

No, wasn't planning on using a DVD drive, I know that won't work anyway, that laptop is not powerfull enough. As for the power, I was referring to applying power to the CD-ROM drive I intend to wire into this .. I don't believe the interface (conversion circuitry in the Dell CD-ROM) would have ample power to drive a standard PC CD-ROM, that's why I plan to use a separate power supply for the "usable" CD-ROM. I have used external power to CD-ROM Drives and Hard Drives before, as long as they share a common ground, there is no problem. Considering the possability of connecting a HD to this in the furure, but I don't believe I would be able to write to the HD since the circuit in the Dell CD-Rom is most likely set up for read only.

If you look at the amperages listed on a PC CD drive for the two voltages, you will see they don't draw very much power at all - I doubt very much that the laptop wiring would not be able to handle it. You can get PCMCIA cards for your type II card slot that will allow you to connect a SATA hard drive to a laptop, so I imagine there are also PCMCIA cards that allow you connect an IDE drive to a laptop, though they may be harder to find these days. Or you could get a PCMCIA card with a USB 2.0 controller and at least two usb ports, but I have no idea whether a usb connected external hard drive would work correctly connected to that considering the slow cpu speed and old mboard chipset you have - I suspect it wouldn't work well.

Not woried about the HD right now, I just need first and formost to be able to boot the laptop from CD and I am hesitant on getting a replacement, especially used from eBay. If I even just had somewhere where I could "borrow" a CD-ROM for it for about 15-20 min, that would work, then everything else could be done across my LAN. I just have a special OS I want to load on it, but the way I set it up, it has got to boot up the machine to load.

Look again. Some of those "hits" on Ebay are NEW CDrom drives.