wkt@csadfa.cs.adfa.oz.au (Warren Toomey) (04/23/91)
Could anybody help me with the following problem. I'm trying to get a Compaq 40 Megabyte Tape drive to work in a non-Compaq machine. The drive has no special name other than the one given above, from the installation manual. It appears to have an Irwin Magnetics tape mechanism (Model 145, Config. No. BG-07), and uses DC2000 40Meg tape cartriges. There is one set of 5 jumper pins (J8), the forth one is shorted, i.e schematically : : : I : The tape drive appears (from the installation guide) to plug into the daisy chain of floppy disk drives. The machine I want it to work in is an IT386SX motherboard (2Meg installed), one 1.2M floppy (A:), one 360K floppy (B:), one 40M AT hard drive (C:), plus VGA, serial & parallel ports etc. The floppy controller can control up to four internal floppies. The problem: the drive is attached as the first drive on the second floppy daisy chain (i.e as the third `floppy'), and the J8 pins set to : : I : : . The machine boots, and the tape drive appears to seek like a 360K floppy. However, the TAPE.exe that comes with the drive fails to find any installed tape drive. If anybody has tried this before & succeeded, or has any ideas that could help, or knows some snail/email addresses of Compaq that may help, I'd love to know. Some technical information would be fantastic (i.e how to write a device driver for it). I'm quite willing to rearrange my floppy configuration to get this to work. Ideas etc. to my email address below. I'll summarise to the net. Thanks!!! Warren Toomey wkt@csadfa.cs.adfa.oz.au