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

[Tothwolf]

On Tue, 6 Oct 2015, Tothwolf wrote:
> 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).

While I don't know if it is fully intact, there seems to be a more 
complete copy here: ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp0000-0500/