Compaq Portable 286 and Portable III - IDE drives?

[Fred Cisin]

On Fri, 3 Mar 2017, Jules Richardson via cctalk wrote:
> Just checking here, as someone told me that this is the case, but do the 
> Compaq Portable 286 and Portable III take stock 40-pin IDE hard drives? I 
> just wanted to make sure that they weren't expecting something that might be 
> a bit non-standard before I go trying to find modern replacements for a pair 
> of failing disks.

I think so, but I also think that Compaq's IDE was before it was 
completely standardized, so there might be some glitches.


> Assuming that an enormous modern(ish) drive is OK, are there any other 
> gotchas involved in configuration and formatting? Obviously I don't need a 
> partition bigger than a few tens of MB, but perhaps there are things to keep 
> in mind when fitting a drive that's most likely to be getting on for a 
> thousand times the capacity of the original.

1) If you are going period OS, get Compaq MS-DOS V3.31.  Anything prior 
to that is limited to 32MB per partition.

2) You may want to use a "disk manager overlay" to be able to use specs 
other than the BIOS ones:
http://www.seasip.info/VintagePC/compaq3.html