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Hello Dreamcast talk,

I been searchin for a tutorial on how to do a Dreamcast IDE hdd mod. Assemblergames use to have an detailed written w/ pics tutorial but the site has taken offline as of lately and unsure when they will come back online. Does anyone know of a substitute site or link that contains that tutorial?

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I recently did the IDE mod and went by the pinout here. Don't bother with that "Dream IDE Reborn" thing; it's expensive for what it is and it's for a full size 40-pin IDE drive which still requires an external power source. 44-pin is the way to go as it's powered from the Dreamcast itself and uses the smaller 2.5" drives which you can actually fit in the Dreamcast itself. I put my drive where the GD-ROM would normally go. The IDE cable just fits to the right of the motherboard. You just need to cut a small section of the metal tray the motherboard sits on.

I also removed the laser mechanism from a non-working GD-ROM drive in order to make room for the HDD. You need the GD-ROM drive attached or the Dreamcast won't boot up. Apparently there's a workaround for this but I found this to be the easier solution.

for clarification I thought it was required to use the gd-rom in place because you still needed to boot Dreamshell from a cd-r, but this isn't the case because you removed the gd-rom optical drive. How is Dreamshell booting, from HDD?

I would love a mod like this.

SegaShazam wrote:for clarification I thought it was required to use the gd-rom in place because you still needed to boot Dreamshell from a cd-r, but this isn't the case because you removed the gd-rom optical drive. How is Dreamshell booting, from HDD?

I flashed the DreamShell bootloader to a custom BIOS chip. I guess it's possible to boot DreamShell from a disc as well but obviously you won't be able to make the drive internal if you have the GD-ROM drive still attached.