And that is how it wound up. I left the dip switches on the motherboard
set to one drive and used DRIVER.SYS to create a drive letter for the
external drive.
For some strange reason, the IBM 4865 external drive unit that I am
using showed up as drive number 3, not 2. (Counting from zero, of
course.) I wonder if there is a twist in the internal cabling, or the
drive select jumper is non-standard on this one. No problem it works
just fine.
The XT in general is a beautiful machine:
512K
Original 10MB hard disk
Original IBM Monochrome/Printer adapter and 5151 Monochrome monitor
VGA card, driving a flat panel display that it shares
3COM 3C503
One internal floppy (full height), one IBM 4865 external floppy
Parallel port Zip disk
I've got this sitting where I work (Big Blue) next to my regular systems
in my office. You'd be surprised at how many people don't recognize
what it is, or how old it is.
Mike
Tony Duell wrote:
The BIAS is, as usual, brain-dead. It assumes
you'll fit both internal
drives before adding external ones. So if you set it for 2 or more drives
and only have one intenral drive, it'll give an error at boot-up
Moreover, if you have 3 or 4 drives, they will be asseigned the letters
A: B: C; (and D:) by MS-DOS, putting the first hard disk partition at E:.
A _very_ large number of installation programs get confused by this.
My suggestion is to set the DIP switches to say you have one floppy
drive. And then (asuming you're running a late-enough MS-DOS) to use
DRIVER.SYS to operate the external drives. If you do that, the internal
drive will be A: _and B: (as it would be on a single-drive machine), your
hard dirve partitions will start at C:, and your exernal drive(s) will
have letters assigned after the last hard drive partition.
-tony