6 Oct
2015
6 Oct
'15
7:35 p.m.
On Mon, 5 Oct 2015, Jules Richardson wrote:
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?)
If you know the Softpaq number, I can see if I have the configuration disk
in my archives. It would have been located in ftp.compaq.com/pub/softpaq/
however at some point most of the files in sp0000-0500/ and sp0501-1000/
at least seem to have disappeared. I have copies of these that I happened
to archive back when I regularly serviced Compaq systems (although I do
not have copies of all of the much much larger softpaq subdirectories).