gsk@khaki (09/09/87)
i trust you've seen G. P. Wilkin's helpful posting
about 1.4M 3.5" drives. i decided to go with 720K.
the floppy controller in the PC6300 supports two drives.
basically, i bought a 720K drive and plugged it into
the existing controller in my 6300.
there are a number of gotchas involved:
1) you probably don't have a spare drive bay in your 6300,
if you're already running a 5 1/4" floppy drive and a
hard drive. you'll thus have to mount something externally.
you'll need an enclosure, power supply, long cables, etc.
2) the two connectors on the cable inside the 6300 are
too close together to fit onto both the internal 5 1/4" drive
and a Toshiba 720K drive at the same time.
3) you need to run DOS 3.2 in order to use 720K drives.
upgrading a hard disk to a new version of DOS can be a real pain:
i.e. backup everything to floppies or tape; run fdisk;
reformat the disk; then restore everything.
make sure you "set the active partition" with fdisk afterwards.
you also have to add a "drivparm" line to your config.sys.
see the DOS 3.2 manual for this.
4) you need to set the switches on the motherboard for 2 floppies.
#1 and #3 were not problems for me, because i simultaneously
added: an external enclosure, a second hard disk, and DOS 3.2.
i installed both hard disks in the external enclosure,
leaving the 5 1/4" floppy and the 3.5" floppy in the system unit.
then i booted DOS 3.2 from floppy and formatted the new hard disk.
then i xcopied my old hard disk to the new one.
then i reformatted my old hard disk with DOS 3.2.
i solved #2 by crimping another connector onto the ribbon cable.
for #4, i can't remember offhand which switches to set.
you'll have to consult the 6300 hardware manuals.
i bought a Toshiba 720K floppy drive ($105) and installation kit ($20)
from a local discount computer store (Technoland in Sunnyvale).
you can order them mail order for comparable prices. be sure you get
both the drive and the "universal" installation kit. the drive alone
is not the right size and does not have the right connector to be
installed in a PC.
good luck.
George S. Kong, Silicon Graphics, Inc., (415)962-3281
gsk@sgi.com
...{decwrl,allegra,sun,adobe,ucbvax,pyramid,ames}!sgi!gskninja@bradley.UUCP (09/13/87)
On our campus, we have 650 - 900 IBM PC's/clones with 5 1/4" drives. A lot of new IBM customers were saying, "Yeah, but if I buy this new IBM, I have to run the new disks, and conversion's a pain." So we borrowed a 3 1/2" drive from a local Radio Shack to see if we could get it to work on our equipment. We got their 720K drive to work on a 6300, Zenith 159, and an IBM PC. We used DOS 3.2, and each machine required a different cabling scheme. Also, it should be noted that the Radio Shack drive in particular was expecting power on the the drive jumper; should keep it in mind if you are adding other people's drives to a RS machine. However, afterward this question appeared in my mind : I've heard that the 5 1/4" expansion drives for the model 25/30/50/60/80 run VERY SLOWLY if you use the 5 1/4" intermitently with the 3 1/2" drive. This would seem to make sense because it would have to configure the controller for the 5 1/4" drive each time it went to read or write to it, then reconfigure it back for the 3 1/2" drive when it's done with the 5 1/4" drive. So have any of the 6300 3 1/2" drive users seen performance problems with the added drive ? Frank McGee, Microcomputer Support Specialist Bradley University, Peoria, Ill. 61625