Possible PUTR bug?

[Douglas Taylor]

I understand your frustration, because all I really wanted to do was 
read/write RX33 and RX50 5-1/4" floppies to move data in and out of my 
microPDP11.  Once, I wanted to write an RX23 3-1/2" floppy with OpenVMS 
PAK files that could be read on an DEC Alpha.

Finding a PC that supports the 5-1/4" floppy drive is difficult, the 
BIOS or FDC chips only support 3-1/2" floppies in many late model PC's.  
It appeared only a few of the older PC's that supported the 5-1/4" 
drives could actually change the spindle speed so you could read/write 
RX50 format.

I dedicated a DELL XPS 233H to this task, 32MB memory, Pentium II cpu.  
Boots from 3GB hard disk, DOS and Win 3.1 (if you so need it).  I also 
have an IDE to CF card adapter standing by when the hard disk dies.  
Love to have something with a smaller form factor, but it gets the job done.

Doug


On 5/11/2019 10:35 AM, Charles via cctalk wrote:
> Just an update... I spent an entire long afternoon wrestling with that 
> old PC, trying to find some combination of HDD jumpers and BIOS 
> settings that would allow the XP hard drive to boot with another drive 
> attached (either on the slave connector or the secondary channel with 
> the CD-ROM removed). No dice.
>
> So I had the bright idea to use Minitool's Partition Wizard, and 
> shrink my Windows partition so there'd be room for a  newDOS partition.
> But it won't even run (probably because I have only 64 MB RAM on that 
> box). Grrr. It's unbelievably slow anyhow, so more SDRAM on order, 
> which is really cheap these days.
> I'd get a newer PC for the workbench, but need to keep the old 
> motherboard because there are a couple of devices (including a PB-10 
> PROM programmer) which are ISA slots.
>
> So, this has become a Windows/PC (ugh) project instead of just being 
> able to play with my PDP-11...
>