#hard drives
Hello to all, Help Help Help.! I've just found out how extraordinarily
complicated it can be to put a new hard drive in an old machine. I have a
Hyundai Super 286-C with an Award Bios 3.03c and Hyundai's very own Super
286-C System Board. Hyundai? You say. Yes they manufacture computers as
well as cars. My Hyundai has been an incredibly reliable machine. Purchased
in July of '88 and Never been down. I've added 2meg of expanded Ram,
Scanner card, 2400 Baud modem, 3.5" drive, Mouse and never had trouble
finding what was compatible until I began looking for a hard drive.
My problem is this I need to put in at least 100 meg (formatted) of
storage. I'll have no problem sacrificing the existing Seagate ST238R 30
meg RLL drive. As long as I get 100M. The Seagate is a Half Height 5.25"
drive. So I need a drive no larger than that (no space for a full height).
I thought of going for a SCSI because of there dimensions but SCSI hasn't
been in the IBM world long enough for me to do that.
My attention was turned to a Conner CP-3104 IDE. IDE is basically a MFM
drive (it uses MFM encoding). After numerous calls to both Hyundai and
Conner information for using this drive is a mess.
It seems Hyundai has discontinued the 286-C, which uses floppy controllers
on the system board and a Western Digital WD1003RAH Hard Drive controller,
and has come out with the 286-E using both controllers on the system board.
The hard drive controller is Conner's embedded SCSI or embedded IDE(MFM)
depending on the drive put in the machine. This is all fine and dandy;
except for the fact that the people at Conner say that I should upgrade my
Bios to Awards 3.05, but it may work with Bios 3.03c, and the people at
hyundai say maybe I should maybe I shouldn't change my bios they're not
sure.
Doesn't changing your Bios mean extensive modifications to your Mother
(system) board? Can anybody suggest a drive that I can use without making
these changes. Are these changes necessary, are they as bad as they seem?
What should I do, which direction should I go? I'd appreciate any and all
responses.
Thank you very much,