16 May
2006
16 May
'06
4:18 p.m.
C. H. Dickman wrote:
I got one for $5 at a garage sale. Everything but the
hard drive
(CP3044 40MB) seems to work.
I cracked it open and replaced the hard drive with one of about the
same vintage and still no go. Further research indicates that it only
works with 3 very specific drives, although I don't know what those
are other than the CP3044.
The two ROM sockets are empty. I think they could contain ROMs with a
floppy disk image and allow the machine to boot without a disk.
Anybody know if this is right? Do you need both sockets populated for
an even/odd byte thing or is it one ROM making up a disk and the two
sockets making two disks?
This leads to an OT MSDOS question: Can MSDOS be told about a hard
disk that the BIOS does not know about? You can probably see my line
of thinking. Make a floppy that boots DOS and can talk to the new HD.
Burn that onto a ROM and then make the machine boot from the ROM socket.
Now what I would do with this 286-10 after that is unclear.
That part number, CP3044, sounds like the same drive that Zenith used in
the SupersPort series. If so, it uses a precursor to the standard IDE
interface and is unique.
It is not likely that hacking the drive CHS table will do anything.
The ROM sockets are for a read-only extension to the floppy drive. The
BIOS supports it that way. The ROMs can contain a bootable image of DOS
and/or any files, including exe's, com's, bat's, etc. There is a
program from GRiD called "rombuild" that would take a file or set of
files and/or the boot portion of a floppy and create images for the
ROM's that you would burn, plug into the 1520, and the BIOS would then
boot from them or just see the files on them.
There is a GRiD group on yahoo groups that has the program rombuild.exe
and a short doc file on how to use it. I put it there and have used it
a lot in the past.
The GRiD machines were very cool for the time. Quite rugged and built
to last a long time.
Dave