Replacements for ST-406/ST-512 drives

[Joe R.]

At 07:04 PM 2/6/05 +0000, you wrote:
>> 
>>    Ditto. That's why I've started hoarding these old drives. A lot of old
>> equipment such as the HP-IB drives uses ST-225s and the like so I'm
>> collecting those too. Hamfests and scrap yeards are a great place to pick
>> up stuff like this for next to nothing.
>
>A second problem is low-level formatting these hard drives. Some machines 
>don't seem to have the software to do it, and just about every controller 
>has its own format.
>
>You mentioned the HPIB drive boxes. I use an HP9133 (I forget the suffix 
>letter, its a 20Mbyte one in the more modern, smaller, box) on my 
>Integral. Althoguh the drive mechanism is a standard ST225, I can tell 
>you from experience that putting a 'blank' ST225 in there just causes it 
>to turn on the fault light. Whether there is some way to get the unit to 
>do an LLF, whether you need a different firmware EPROM, or what, I don't 
>know. But I jaut hope that disk keeps on working.

   You are correct about some HP-IB drives not being able to format their
own disks. I've had mixed results with the HP drives. I wonder if you could
mount the bare HP-IB disk drive (before it fails) and a regular ST-225 in a
PC and use Ghost or some other software to duplicate it?

   Joe

   Joe