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/
