Compaq Portable III Floppy Drive

From: David C. Jenner <djenner_at_halcyon.com>
Date: Mon Sep 6 22:09:58 1999

Mike,

A while ago, I found a 3 1/2" drive for either a Compaq III or Compaq 386
to replace the 5 1/4" drive now in a machine. I found it complete with
bezel, rails, power and signal conversion connectors. The drive is a
Toshiba ND-3561GR. I haven't gotten around to trying it, so I don't know
if it works.
Dave

Mzthompson_at_aol.com wrote:
>
> I picked up a Compaq Portable III in a salvage lot. I had no problems
> with the machine until the 5 1/4" 1.2mb floppy apparently failed.
> If you attempt to read a disk, the disk is rendered entirely unusable,
> in fact you can not even reformat it in another machine.
>
> Knowing that it was unlikely that I would find another 5 1/4 drive, I
> decided to replace it with a 3 1/2" 1.44mb drive. I had to modify a
> pair of mounting rails to get the drive mounted correctly and fashion
> a piece of plastic to fill in the empty space around the drive, and
> it ended up looking pretty good physically.
>
> I booted the machine, it reported the difference in the drive, I ran
> the setup program and that all went well. Then it came time to read
> a disk the machine would not access the drive.
>
> When I grabbed a spare drive I happen to grab a Sony MFD-17W-50L.
> Believing that I might have grabbed a bad drive, I tried several other
> drives. I tried another Sony MFD-17W-50L, a Sony MFD-17W-5GD,
> a Newtronics/Mitsumi D359T3, and a TEAC FD-235HF. The results were
> that none of the Sony drives would work and the others worked fine.
>
> I checked the 5 1/4 drive and it was set for an ID of drive 1 as
> expected since there was the usual twist in part of the ribbon cable.
> The drives that worked were set to an ID of 1. One of the Sony's was
> set to an ID of 0, but I tried all ID's on the Sony's to no avail.
>
> I finally installed the TEAC drive and everythng is fine. I am curious
> as to why the Sony's would not work. Anybody got any insights, or had
> problems with Sony drives in other machines.
>
> TIA
> Mike Thompson
Received on Mon Sep 06 1999 - 22:09:58 BST