Installing an Optical Drive into an Acer Aspire E 15?

nijireiki

I picked up an Aspire E 15 a month or so ago, and I was surprised to find it's far less user-servicable than my past Acer computers have been (Aspire One D250 and an Aspire 5750Z)-- but even though I'm not quite bold enough to try and tinker with the battery, RAM, or hard drive, installing a DVD+/-RW seemed easy enough, until... I tried to do it.

 

It takes a 9.5mm height (ULTRA-SLIM laptop drive) tray-loading SATA, and I had an HP/LG GSA-U20N on hand, BUT:

 

1. when I insert the drive to test it in the laptop, the drive isn't powering up (this may be a problem with the drive, but I'm not sure if there's some obvious step I'm missing? Funkiness with drivers? Something as simple as a reboot?*) [*Addtl. context: I am new to Windows 8. This might be extremely obvious, but, yeah, I'm not even sure where to look for this kind of thing vs. Win7 and WinXP systems.]
2. the dummy drive cover that the laptop comes with looks like there's a bracket an actual optical drive would need to remain screwed in place-- and there's only one screw, so without this bracket, you're... screwed. I know there's eBay sellers etc. who sell these sort of things for ~$5, but the one I bought was slightly off in terms of height/depth placement. Is there a direct source for this part and/or another Acer model that uses the same bracket form factor so I know what to look for?
3. likewise, this laptop needs sort of a funny optical drive bezel that wraps around the front of the drive and hooks under it, sort of tapering down, otherwise there's an exposed gap between the drive and the body of the computer where they aren't flush. Normally I wouldn't care about the aesthetics, but a hole for dirt and dust to get into laptop guts is a big no-no. So, same question as above: directo parts sourcing? Body matches?

I'd like to avoid needing to just buy an entire second as-is/broken E 15 to scavenge for parts, but it's frustrating to have an empty bay there and need to plug in to an external DVD/BD drive every time I want to listen to music or watch a movie.

philetus

Try calling your local small computer shops for a used bracket.