frankb@campo.UUCP (10/21/87)
I am trying to help a friend upgrade his DEC Rainbow . It currently
uses a 5mb hard drive, and he needs 10mb or larger.
Are their commercially available (mail order?) drives of this size?
Will I need to buy a new controller? I think I remember hearing that
only certain DOS rev's will format the larger drives (2.1 or above,
maybe?)?
Please respond via mail, as I don't retain this newsgroup for long.
Thanks.
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Franklyn Berry Solutions in Software, Inc. Pgh, PA .
{allegra, bellcore, cadre, idis, psuvax1}!pitt!darth!campo!frankb .
.......................................................................bcw@rti.UUCP (Bruce Wright) (10/30/87)
In article <102@campo.UUCP>, frankb@campo.UUCP (Frank) writes: > > I am trying to help a friend upgrade his DEC Rainbow . It currently > uses a 5mb hard drive, and he needs 10mb or larger. > I am sending this to the net because my mailer refuses to recognize the address of the poster of the original question - could someone a bit closer to him pass it on to him? - and also there have been a couple of other questions along this line, so there seem to be a lot of people who could use this information. Basically, you can run just about any disk drive on a Rainbow that you can on an IBM-PC (_NOT_ AT). You will, however, need a special format program - the one which comes with the 5-MB Rainbow disk drive will not format a larger drive properly. We are running a stock Seagate 225 hard disk drive on our Rainbow, and using the upper half of the slot for a Suitable Solutions I-DRIVE (an IBM-compatible floppy disk for the Rainbow). This makes a pretty nice system, especially if you need to copy files often between the Rainbow and IBM-PC systems. There are other [mostly software] solutions to the problem, some costing significantly less $, but they are not as complete or as nice -- sort of depends on your volume of disks whether they are reasonable (also they won't deal with DSDD drives since the Rainbow floppy drives are strictly single-sided). We use WUTIL to format the Seagate drive. This is a public-domain disk formatter program which will handle a very large number of disk types. You do need to format a disk of > 8 MB as a series of 8 MB partitions, but MS-DOS v 2.11 (which you should have for the 5 MB drive anyway) will recognize the extra partitions. The problem is that the Rainbow version of MS-DOS v 2.* does not support 4 KB clusters (a la IBM's PC-DOS v 2.*). One of the advantages of MS-DOS v 3.* is that it would allow the use of the entire disk drive (up to 32 MB) as one logical drive - but >sob< DEC has not seen fit to let this out to the masses. Do not use versions of WUTIL before v 2.0 -- some of them have _serious_ bugs which can destroy your hard drive !!! If you can't find it in your favorite bulletin board, I can supply you with the files for WUTIL v 2.0 - send me mail and we can arrange to ship it via modem or a self-addressed stamped floppy. As for putting a V20 chip in the Rainbow, this is a bit of trouble. The startup code for the Rainbow has some timing-dependent loops and the V20 is too fast for it - therefore (unless you change the ROM-BIOS) you get an error message every time you start up (and possibly some configurations will refuse to come up at all). I'm not sure it's worth it for the marginal gain, but if there is interest I will try to locate an article about doing it from one of the Rainbow magazines before its demise. Our US Snail address (should you want to send a SASF) is: SoftWright Systems P. O. Box 3208 Durham, NC 27705 Good luck. Bruce C. Wright