res@ptsfa.UUCP (Bob Stockwell) (03/07/86)
I finally bit the bullet and purchased an Expansion board for my Columbia MPC 1600. It came with 128K on the motherboard and no capability for expansion on the mother board itself, with the possible exception of switching chips which seemed like to much of a hassle and I'm not sure that I could do it anyway. Anyway, I bought a Zuckerboard from Advanced Transducer Devices, Inc (256K bit chips). When I tried to install it, it wouldn't fit in the machine (the distance between the bus connectors and the back of the machine was slightly too big), so I called up ATD and they were baffled. I sent it back to them and they tried it in their machine and (so they told me) it fit fine. Now I know that I could be doing something wrong but I have two other boards in my machine which fit fine. Somebody came up with the bright idea of taking the bracket off the board so that I would let the board stick out the back of the machine (just a hair, but enough that it would fit). So now I could fit it in the machine. But, here is where I am now. With the board installed I get the following message: UNABLE TO READ SECTOR ON DRIVE A: RETRY/ABORT/IGNORE (R/A/I) : when I boot. It seems to find the boot files just find but when it has to read the Directory to look for COMMAND.COM it fails. By the way this is both MS-DOS 2.11 and PC-DOS 2.1. Curiously CPM86 (an old release) boots fine, but later has trouble reading the disk. Has anyone ever had any of the above problems? By the way, I couldn't get the Zuckerboard to fit in my (genuine) XT at work either. I haven't tried to install the bracketless board in my XT as I'm not sure what adding 512K (contiguous?) memory expansion to a 256K machine would do. Thanks for any help. Bob Stockwell ptsfa!res