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...
