On 03/03/2017 03:08 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
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.
Yes, that's my concern. I thought it may even be expecting something like
XTA, but I suppose that doesn't really make sense given the '286 or '386
CPU (I only picked up the Portable III last weekend and I'm not sure which
CPU it has - I believe that the later ones had the '386)
1) If you are going period OS, get Compaq MS-DOS V3.31. Anything prior to
that is limited to 32MB per partition.
Well, I suspect 32MB will be plenty :-)
I don't think I've ever actually tried putting a large-capacity IDE disk
into a machine which was designed for something much smaller (I've always
had a stash of period drives kicking around in case of failure). I'm not
sure if it all gets translated into a linear address somewhere between
system and drive anyway[1], so I can pretty much pick any BIOS drive type
and expect it to just work (obviously at massively-reduced capacity!), or
if the drive really is addressed via CHS and so I need to pick type[2]
carefully (or look into LLF).
[1] And I know that I used to know the answer to things like that, but it
all fell out of my head years ago :-(
[2] Maybe picking something that's "smaller in all dimensions" works,
though? It would waste some enormous number of sectors on each track, but
that's not really an issue if it works!
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
Aha, some useful info there - thanks!
cheers,
Jules
