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

[Tothwolf]

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).