stupid PC tricks - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

15 May 2000

Ok, a year or so ago I rescued a Compaq Portable II. Not exactly in line
with my normal interests, but the owner had the right personality and
convinced me to do it anyway.

One thing she told me she had always wanted to do but never managed to get
done was install a hard card in the box, which as she bought it, had only
two 5.25" floppy drives.

Friday I picked up an 80 MB Plus HardCard at a local PC recycler's. It was
sold as-is, but for $1 I figured I'd take a chance.

I'm having problems with it, and the problems I'm having don't seem to
indicate a real hardware problem, but I'm not too familiar with hardcards:

* The Compaq setup utility recognizes it as a "type 11" disk, but
  conveniently neglects to tell me anything about what this actually
  means. Thinking of it now, I should RTFM and see if this information
  is listed in any of the dead-trees docs I got with the machine.

* PC-DOS 3.30 fdisk sees a 77 MB disk with a single non-dos partition, 
  which seems correct, as at 80 MB it wouldn't be FAT12.

* PC-DOS 3.30 fdisk hangs when trying to write any partition information
  to the disk.

* MS-DOS 4.01 recognizes the disk and I can get a directory listing of c:\

* MS-DOS 4.01 fdisk hangs when trying to write any partition information
  to the disk.

Where should I be looking and what should I be trying to make this work?

ok
r.