IBM PC-RT (was: AIX)

From: Doc Shipley <doc_at_mdrconsult.com>
Date: Thu Apr 1 23:53:37 2004

On 2 Apr 2004, R. D. Davis wrote:

> Quothe Doc Shipley, from writings of Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 05:06:34PM -0600:
> > I have to agree, though, that I haven't found a lot of similarity between
> > what's installed on the RT and what I run on my 43Ps.
>
> Speaking of the RT, did anyone ever get these to work with any sort of
> easily obtainable hard drives? Finding ESDI drives that would work was
> somewhat of a pain, and is why I stopped using my RT (hmmm... I wonder
> if it still works?)

  Mine's running an old ISA Dell I/O card with 2x 5.25" floppy drives and a
Seagate 280MB IDE Medalist hanging off it. I have the bookmark for the
instructions somewhere, but it boils down to needing an IDE adapter that's
pretty brainless, and that either has no serial ports or can be turned off,
a Seagate Medalist <2GB, a goat, and 2 plucked chickens.

  I seriously did have to beat the drive repeatedly with the AOS LL-format
utility to get it running. After it took a BSD filesystem, it then
happily accepted TLC from the VM tools.

  Apparently, *only* the Medalist line supports an arcane instruction or
sense bit or something that the ESDI adapter used and the system firmware
wants to see. And, at this point, I'm not sure that a <2GB Medalist
qualifies as "easily obtainable". ;)

  At that point I was able to power up the RT without dimming my office
lights. Three very tired E70s suck some serious amps spooling up.

  I'd dearly love to snarf a mouse and a Matrox graphics adapter for the
thing, but it's one of my pride & joy items just as it is.


        Doc
Received on Thu Apr 01 2004 - 23:53:37 BST