My Portable II uses a Miniscribe ST506/412 drive hooked up to a bridge
board that I'm told is IDE at the other side, back to the controller. The
original drive in my machine is toast - I had to pop the lid to free the
spindle. It spins up now, and might cough up some data (for a while), so
intention is two-fold:
1) Put the original drive and bridge board into a more modern system to
attempt a read,
2) Replace the original drive/bridge combo with a more modern IDE drive
(happy to waste 99% of the space on it...)
Are there any gotchas involved to either of these, given that IDE was
presumably in its infancy when the system was current, and so its possibly
a slightly different animal to a more modern version? I don't want to fry
the Compaq's controller, or the bridge board.
In addition to this, the machine's lost its config, so currently defaults
to a floppy boot. Does anyone happen to have an image of the 360K setup
floppy, either in Imagedisk or raw format? (LLF is presumably 512 byte
sectors, 9 sectors/track, and 40 tracks per side?)
cheers
Jules