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Conner peripherals - 40mb = what is the 3 pin power connector format?

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First post, by kleung21

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First time post but have been lurking for years.

I have a 386sx Acer Anyware 1100lx Laptop/luggable and there are a couple of things that I've repaired on it.

1) The Dallas RTC CMOS chip is hard soldered onto the motherboard. I dremeled down to the power pins, soldered on some leads and now have a cr2032 powering the RTC. ... Works great.

2) The 3.5 Floppy drive was failing; replaced with a Gotek floppy emulator. Needed to dremel it to fit ; but works.

My current biggest problem is that the 40mb Conner Peripherals hard drive is noisy / possibly failing. I want to replace it BUT, the motherboard has a wierd 3 pin power connector instead of an Molex /floppy power connector.

the https://www.ebay.com/itm/CONNER-CP3044-40MB-I … E-/184531754072 Hard drive (conner cp3044) also has a 3 pin power connector as well as a standard molex 4 pin.
https://www.computerhope.com/hdd/hdd0036.htm

Does anyone know what the 3 pin power connector is and whether I can resolder/build a new power cable to a more modern molex system. Conversely, has anyone used jumper wires to power a modern compactflash adapter or a notebook ide drive. Any helps or leads would be appreciated.

** for anyone looking, one of the reasons this survived was that the NIMH power battery is sealed and in a separate compartment/ never leaked.

In addition, the CMOS battery is on the Dallas chip so didn't leak either.

It looks like it uses tantalum capacitors so again.... no leaking/cap damage.

Last edited by kleung21 on 2021-02-11, 05:20. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 2 of 3, by kleung21

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I didn't want to do it... But this computer that I've had mothballed for the last 2-3 years because of the extremely loud connor peripherals 40 mb hard drive has finally been revived.

Interesting enough, the pinout was (ground, 12v, 5v ) for the 3 pin connector. I'll post pictures someday but it must be one of those oddities.

The computer was manufactured in 1990 and seems pretty rare. It's a real brick. But in a good way.

For future reference.... I tried 2 different IDE-CF adapters (40 pin) as well as a 44 pin ide-cf adapter and it would only give me an error (1 long - 3 short beeps). The screen showed nothing and I thought I had killed it. In the end, using a modern IDE hard drive worked even though I was worried about the bios limitations.

I took the safe root and since you can specify custom hard drive in bios, I did that using the 504 mb hard drive maximum just in case even though the new drive was a 20gb ide drive. 504 mb => 1024 x 16 heads x 63 sectors

That worked PERFECTLY. And now the compuer is essentially silent since the drive spins quiet and there is so much insulation in this brick.

BTW, installation of the hard drives required COMPLETE disassebly right down to the motherboard.

ALSO, this had the infamous Dallas cmos chip where I had to grind down and solder to the pins a new battery / holder.

Overall.... LOVE that I finally got a 386 machine up and running.

Reply 3 of 3, by kleung21

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Ok. I got out the voltmeter and measured it

the pins were (ground/12v/5v) Weird that the old hard drives had this type of connector as an alternate to the molex

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