Automatic digest processor wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason: >JM> The drive seems to work since, when I plug the thing in and turn it >JM> on the drive clearly spins up. > >This drive is one of the early ones, that you were supposed to >"park" before powering down. No telling where the heads are resting >now, but I'd be rather careful in handling the thing... :-)
Adp> Ouch ... Important note, here. Indeed. I've had one experience with trashing track zero on one of those drives, that was enough. ><...> > >JG> 50-pin Centronics. The two ports are for chaining external SCSI >JG> devices (you can chain up to seven). At the very least you'll need >JG> both ports, because one will need a terminator if you do nothing >JG> else with it. > >A lot of this sort of device has selectable termination built in, >enabled with a switch or a jumper. Adp> However, many of the early devices, this Seagate drive included, I Adp> believe, didn't have the termination available on the drive. Actually, the early Seagate stuff, including the MFM drives, did have termination options -- by way of a resistor pack that plugged in on the bottom of the board. I have no idea offhand if this is also the case with the SCSI drives or not. I have a couple of "monster" (full-ht, 1G or so?) SCSI drives here that both have rows of resistor packs near the ribbon cable connector, one has a jumper nearby and the other one doesn't. ><...> > >JM>sort of cable would I need for this thing? I'm guessing it would >JM>plug into JM>an LTP port on one end at the back of the computer. Is >JM>that correct? > >Adp> Nope, you'd need a SCSI card like an AHA-1542CF. They're spendy, >Adp> so not really usefull for a survpc. > >Actually I do have two computers here that use such a box, one being an >Osborne Executive, and the other a Kaypro 4. The Exec does indeed use the >printer/IEEE port, which is a _smaller_ (24-pin?) version of the >same type of connector, the Kaypro uses an internal adapter that feeds >the ribbon cable out of the box. Both ran cp/m... Adp> I'd forgotten about these older boxes. Yes, there are some Adp> parallel- port interface boxes around, which could hook a hard Adp> drive, CD-ROM, or other nifty device to a parallel port. You can do darn near anything with a parallel port, if you try hard enough. Though the results are not going to be anywhere near optimum, at least it'll work... Adp> In my recollections, though, drivers were always a problem - Adp> getting the driver loaded and having it stay resident often took Adp> some tinkering. Yes. Adp> <SNIP> >While we're on this subject, I have a couple of external cdrom drives here >that use the same style of connector. The only problem is, they each only >have _one_ connector on the box! What I'd need, to be able to use >both, is some sort of a Y-adapter, and my luck in finding such a >beast hasn't been too good so far. Anybody ever seen one of these? Adp> If these are the external parallel port-connection CD-ROM drives, No, they're SCSI, no doubt in my mind about that. There are quite plain options to set termination and device ID on each. And the "centronics-style" connectors are definitely 50 pins. <...> --- To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
