jeff@drexel.UUCP (Jeff White) (11/03/88)
At one of the places I work at, we have a couple of Tandy 1200's (XT cloneswhich are getting enough serious use that daily/every other day backups are starting to be considered. We're using Fastback Plus to do the backups, and although we are pleased with it, some of the machines require 5/10/15 360k floppies to backup their data only. Having to deal with so many floppies makes it difficult to get the users to do their own backups. I was going to propose that we replace the standard 360k full height drive with a new 1.2M half height drive. This would not only greatly reduce the number of floppies used per backup set, but also allow interchanging of disks for people who work on AT-type machines. I am under the impression that to do this, I would require: 1. A 5 1/4", 1.2Mbyte drive (about $110-$130). 2. A new disk controller board capable of handling the higher capacity drives (about $40-$100) Ps. - the 1200's have the floppy controller built onto the motherboard. Will this be a problem?). 3. A 3.x version of DOS (where x is probably at least 2, if not 3). Am I missing anything? Once whatever steps to get the 5 1/4" drive are completed, will a 3 1/2" drive be able to be added by just attaching the drive (ie. no new controller or OS)? This isn't required, but the capability to add one makes the upgrade look more feasible. Note that since the new 1.2M drive will be the only floppy, it must be a bootable one. There won't be an ordinary 360k drive that I can boot up a kludge driver to then get the 1.2M drive to work. If anyone has eveer done this, or knows the required details, I would very much appreciate hearing from you. Jeff White Drexel University - ECE Dept. rutgers!bpa!drexel!jeff
MSPINNER@POLYGRAF.BITNET (11/04/88)
Well, I have a Tandy 3000 system and I wanted to add a 1.44Mb Toshiba old-type 3.5" drive (don't ask why old-type, yet). So, I needed to get a new version of BIOS to handle 1.44Mb drives. 720K will work with IBM DOS 3.3 driver.sys sett ing up a virtual disk drive from the physical drive. Getting back to adding a 1.2 Mb drive to a XT might require an upgrade of BIOS, but I think driver.sys should do the drive to set the logical device to a 80 track formatting. If the device driver doesn't work - BIOS may be the way to go. Mitch Spinner Caio| #! rnews