Compaq Portable II - IDE compatibility (and setup disk image)

Jules Richardson jules.richardson99 at gmail.com
Mon Oct 5 07:58:14 CDT 2015


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


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