First post, by c64z80
It sounds pretty confusing written down and I have it pictured in my head but I will try to explain 😜
I saw a vanilla 286 for sale today at the local car boot for dirt cheap but without the HD. However the only interface it uses is the SDSI attached to an ISA card on which the serial ports are too.
The only SDSI hard drives I can find are from the US and they are insanely expensive but I came across a cheap ISA 16bit IDE card on ebay.
The seller also says this will work on machines as old as the original PC as the seller puts it "However, making this work on an 8-bit slot requires some circuitry to chop the 16-bit data into 8-bit chunks for the bus to handle." So I think it is 8bit too?
I was thinking of plugging this into the 286 and from this card have an IDE to compact flash adapter. The CF card I will be using is around 32MB or maybe a little higher like 64-120MB if the BIOS allows.
The questions running around in my head are:
1) Do you guyshave experience of such a setup and would it work without a hitch or would there be compatibility or power problems along the line?
2.) I should mention that I see 2 types of IDE>CF adapters, one which uses the floppy connector for power and the others which say that they draw power from the IDE connector itself... but with the IDE connector being on an ISA card I am not too sure about this either.
3.) Assuming everything goes great I am thinking the way to put software onto the computer would be to power it down once everything is installed, unplugging the CF card and putting software onto it from the laptop, then plugging it back into the computer... instead of relying on floppies except to install DOS. Is this a good idea too?
And, sorry for all my questions. These are ones I cannot find good answers for on google mainly because I cannot find ansers for this steup. I know a bit about each item individually but not together like this. I have never even looked inside a computer this far back except on youtube videos but if it is still there tomorrow when I go back I would love to get it working with DOS and old games/programs 😁
Thank you 😀