Change optical drive in mbp 17" c2d

[jkester]

Hi. So a week ago i got my beautiful new 17" mbp c2d only to realize that i can't flash this firmware to make my optical drive region free. from what i've read, i should swap it for a pioneer k06 if i wanna have region free fun, but i'm wondering if this is safe; if i can do it myself; et cetera? is this a good idea? should i take it to a store to have done? how much should that cost? the drive itself is only $75 so i'm tempted. one more question: should i wait till a better, region-free, and possibly blu-ray/hd-dvd drive is out? thanks.

 

[persep]

Hi,
I recently changed my combo drive in a Powerbook G4 15" for a Pionner DVR-K05. One warning, these drives come default to Cable/Select in their firmware and the PB needs it to be set to master for the laptop to boot from a dvd holding the C key although it still could boot from the option key. So I had to do some soldering in the optical cable to set the drive to master which is something really hard to do as you can see in this picture I took.
The benefit is that the Pionners drives are a lot better than the matshita ones Apple is shipping now in their computers