The Teac cd drive on my old Toshiba laptop was beginning to fail and it got to the point where I could no longer boot the Puppy CD as I would get buffer i/o errors when trying to load the pup_202.sfs file (I think the compessed format of this file makes drive performance more critical as I could still boot some other cd's OK). Fortunately I was able to pick up a replacement drive on a local auction site. The new drive shows up in Puppy as "QSI CD-RW/DVD-ROM SWB-242" and had the added bonus of being a CD writer and DVD reader. One problem though, these oem combo drives come preconfigured in firmware to slave, this means it showed up in Puppy as /dev/hdd instead of /dev/hdc and also meant that it couldn't be seen by the bios at boot time so wasn't bootable.
I tested a couple of options for overcomming this problem:
Option 1: sbm boot floppy: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfile ... up_id=4185
Use of this disk has been covered elsewhere on the forum so I wont repeat it here except to say that on the first boot with sbm floppy you may get a black screen with no sign of activity while sbm quietly detects hardware, then the boot menu will appear, once the information has been saved on the floppy, the menu will appear almost instantly on subsequent reboots. The menu gave me a CD0 option that enabled me to boot a Puppy cd from the new drive.
Option 2: converting drive back to master at the connector:
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/PB_G3/oem_co ... drive.html
In my case this was the better more permanent solution but requires soldering experience with very small pins. I made a solder bridge between two pins on the connector (if you short the wrong ones it could damage the drive or motherboard). After the mod my drive is now bootable and shows up as /dev/hdc.
