After a couple of weeks searching the internet and a number of post on the forums i have cracked it! YAHOO! My new drive was'nt working in my laptop (dvd-rw) and i had tried everything. The drive was'nt coming up in the bios and could'nt get the computer to boot up!
This is what ive done:
removed hard drive and put the jumper to slave and replaced.
opened the dvd drive and soldered pins 45 and 47 together and replaced
accessed the bios and changed the primary master to the dvd drive and the primary slave to the hard drive and then rebooted

WARNING!!! this may not work on all laptops!!!

Wow, sounds like a pretty complicated solution. Glad to see you got your stuff working though.

I have similar problem with that drive on my Samsung but my hard drive is working fine. The DVD is not seen by bios but the hard drive does. I found funny solution, when I have my old DVD drive installed, everything is working ok. I switched my computer to hibernate and replaced the drive. When it starts its working ok and new drive is installed on the system. Unfortunately, when I restart system there is no cdrom drive there anymore so I need to put the old one to get it work and then replace again without restarting the system. I bought that drive on eBay from Malaysia.

TEKNICS, could I ask if you have a Toshiba Satellite S1800-700 laptop? I want to replace my CD/DVD Rom combo with the same DVD-RW drive you used. Think its possible?

50 pence, is your laptop working fine now after doing that?