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
