HELP! Osbourne drives

From: James Willing <jimw_at_agora.rdrop.com>
Date: Mon Sep 13 16:25:41 1999

On Mon, 13 Sep 1999, Joe wrote:
> At 12:06 PM 9/13/99 -0400, Jake wrote:
> >
> >swap the drives into another machine and see if they'll read the messydos
> >disks... unless the drives are weird proprietary..
>
> I've been told that they're different from standard drives. But I'm not
> sure of that. I'm hoping that someone can tell me for sure. One problem is
> that they're single sided drives so I need to find a machine that supports
> SS drives. I know a PC will read and write SS disks but all the current
> ones do expect the drive to be double sided.

Well... not having had the need to pull apart any of the 'Execs' in my
collection (so far), I can only offer an observation from the earlier
Osborne machines.

The drives are mainly different in that the drive power is provided on the
same cable as the control and data signals, rather than on a seperate
cable like 'most' drives.

Without a specially configured cable (at least) it will be difficult to
operate the drives on another system. In fact, one of the disk exerciser
units I have has a special configuration block to deal with Osborne
drives.

-jim
---
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Received on Mon Sep 13 1999 - 16:25:41 BST

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