Safe place to find older drivers

I'm working on an old Micron with an upgraded Intel D850MV board. I have a couple old optical drives, and possible other things I may need drivers for. My first try was on Sony's website (for a DDU1613 DVD-ROM), but no luck. Is there a "safe" place to find older drivers?
Thanks

Reply 1 : Safe place to find older drivers

However, custom drivers are rarely a requirement for components such as optical drives, and such is the case for the DDU1613. In short, the default drivers included with Windows are sufficient, and the manufacturer will generally not supply their own, even during the product's expected lifecycle.

John

Reply 2 : Safe place to find older drivers

Kind of what I thought, but I took on the project of an old Micron PC my neighbor gave me. It's got upgraded guts (Intel P4 MoBo), but I'm having trouble with the optical drives not showing up. This may be caused by a funky HDD I stuck in there, but trying to eliminate any possible causes.
Thanks for the response .

Reply 3 : Safe place to find older drivers

Check in the system BIOS on boot to see if the optical drive shows up. If so, it is a software/driver issue. If not, it is a hardware issue, though it could be anything from the cable to the PSU, to the motherboard, to the...
Hopefully it is not a hardware issue.

John

Note: This post was edited by forum moderator on 03/03/2011 on 8:38 PM PT

Reply 4 : Safe place to find older drivers

Both drives were a no show in the BIOS the last time it would boot. They didn't appear in Device Manager or My Computer either. Now I can't seem to get it to boot at all, even with the drives disconnected. Everything turns on, but the screen stays blblack.

My only other computer is an old Dell with a reliable HDD loaded with XP. What would happen to it if I were to just plug that into the Micron, just for the sake of tracking down these issues? Would it hose the XP installation on it, and would it even work on the Micron, so I can figure out what's wrong, [i[without reloading the OS? My goal is to use it there permanently, but want to make sure the hardware doesn't need much money put into it before I go to the trouble of reinstalling XP.
Rob

Reply 5 : Safe place to find older drivers

A PC doesn't need a hard disk to boot. It will work perfectly when booting from either a bootable CD/DVD, a bootable USB-stick or a bootable floppy, depending on what the motherboard supports.

If the drives don't show up in the BIOS (in it's default configuration) that means there's an issue with either the driver, or the motherboard, or the cables connectiong them.

Kees

Reply 6 : Safe place to find older drivers

I was wondering about the cables. The drives power up, but that's it. The cables are nice looking ASUS ones with no obvious signs of damage, but I'll try swapping a DVD drive and cable from my working PC and see what happens.
Thanks!