#Hard drive boots
1 messages in this thread
I thought of it years ago. We made (and still have) some adaptor boards for
the disk expansion port that allow you to use a standard drive as a real
amiga drive; the interface monitors the write protect line (in hardware)
and translates it into what AmigaDOS want's to see from a drive. Nifty
little boards; and at the time, they would allow you to save a couple
hundred bucks if you had an 80 track drive. It HAD to be an 80-track
drive, because Amiga DOS assumes that if a drive responds to the poll
sequence, it's a std 80 track 3.5 inch drive. Well, 5 1/4 inch drives work
to (AmigaDIS didn't know, and actually there was no way to tell it) just as
if they were 3.5s. Unfortunately, 40 track drives would NOT work as they
would show up as 40 tracks of an 80 track drive. Oh well. <grin> Another
piece of hardware languishing in the closet. I think we have about 20 of
them left, still. I'd have to look to be certain – it's possible they were
junked during a "purge".
The boards were real cute, too – you mounted them to the last disk on the
system, and plugged in a std IBM ribbon… and off you went. No fuss, no
muss.