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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