lawrence@cs.concordia.ca (Lawrence A. Hegarty) (06/05/91)
Due to the availability of the X binaries for Xenix, I have been doing the hard disk shuffle to make room. First my system: a 25mhz 386 with 4 meg RAM and an WD1006V-SR2 RLL controller with a Toshiba 104 Meg Hard drive I just added a ST-125 MFM disk with a WD1002-WX1 MFM secondary controller. I have formatted it with DOS and plan on moving my DOS partition from the Toshiba to the Seagate. (If I had any guts at all, I would dump the DOS partition completely, but I just can't quite let go of DOS completely yet. I don't actually use it much at all, it's just psychological. :-)) Now the question, can I get Xenix to boot DOS from the second HD on the secondary controller? Otherwise I could leave the smallest possible DOS partition on the Toshiba just to boot DOS from and then keep most of the DOS stuff on the Seagate drive. The next big question: How should I increase my disk space a lot? I plan on adding a secondary drive, and probably dumping the ST-125. Since my WD1006 controller will work with a second drive I'm very tempted to get another RLL drive. I need a half hight drive and would like about 100meg. Unfortunately, I can only seem to find two options: a Seagate ST277R 65meg (a bit small) or a Microscience 1090 120Meg. I would guess the Seagate is good quality; it costs ~$250 and is probably a safe bet, but is kind of small. At only $345 The Microscience sounds too good to be true. I have never heard of Microscience. Is there a catch with this drive? Only 3 places in the Computer Shopper seem to carry it. There might be a third option. A salesperson at one hard disk vender suggested I could add a SCSI drive and controller. That would seem to be a good idea, but it I would have to add a SCSI host adapter. This is no problem if it doesn't conflict with my RLL controller. But, the big question is, will it work with SCO Xenix 2.3.2? I don't think I have the GT version which works with SCSI so I think this set up up might not work with Xenix. I also want to make sure all this hardware will work when I someday upgrade to some 386 UNIX. Any advise here? I realize I have asked a lot of questions, but I'm a poor grad student who has scraped and saved in order to get a new hard drive and I can't afford to make a mistake with this purchase. Thanks in advance, (reply with email or to the net) Lawrence A. Hegarty lawrence@concour.cs.concordia.ca