toma@tekchips.UUCP (Tom Almy) (01/15/86)
Well, I said I would post my experiences putting a 20 meg hard disk in my Tandy 1000, but I didn't expect that it would take this long. It turned out to be quite an adventure! First of all, as someone posted around Christmas time (too late for me), the T1k exchanges the hard disk and vertical retrace interrupts, so a standard IBM PC controller will not work! I got my controller from Hard Drive Specialist, (800)-231-6671 for $205. Be sure that the drive you purchase is a low power variety if you want to mount it internally. A low power drive and the above controller (which uses the Western Digital VLSI controller) means no power supply problems! I had my BIOS Rom upgraded to version 1.01, but the fellow at Hard Drive Specialist says that wasn't necessary. Tandy will not sell the ROM, you have to let them install it -- about 5 bucks for the part and 20 for the labor (ugh!). I am using PCDOS 3.1 and highly recommend it! For the 20 megabyte drive you need it to get a small cluster size. It also has a working MODE command (the one that came with MSDOS, even with the recent revision, doesn't do all it claims) and a GRAPHICS command that doesn't show an overwhelming preference for Tandy printers. One problem -- I had to remove my V20 chip! With the V20 in place it would not boot from the hard disk unless a floppy was present during the initial floppy read and then removed before the actual boot! It would boot 75% of the time if I had an unformatted floppy in the drive! It appears to be a timing problem in the Tandy BIOS ROM. I now have to decide if I want hard disk booting or booting off of a floppy and V20 execution. Thanks to all that gave me input on this subject. Tom Almy