Nope - definitely IDE, had an IDE drive in it and someone just either
didn't have the sled/tray anymore or just decided to do something on
their own. Either way, I have several of the lines from the cable that
are off the through holes for the IDE interface. I've taken photo's,
made a drawing of the pinouts on the motherboard and now I'm writing
down what each of the through holes are going to on the IDE cable and
then will work through the process of elimination and tracing (which is
not easy as the motherboard has an RF grid pattern solder layer on the
bottom of the motherboard (board is 4 layer) but some time and patience
with a multimeter and I should be able to figure out where all of the
detached lines need to go to, there are only 5 so hopefully it won't be
too much work. Still trying to figure out which chip is managing the
IDE, I found which manages the Floppy.
Yes, the 12v actually has a power connector line run to it for the HD
power, along with the 5v and GND's... I need to redo those as well,
they way they were done is not very safe.
Once smart thing the person did was run the CMOS battery lines up
through the media housing and used 2 AA battery holders to substitute
for the CMOS battery and they tuck in very nicely nice to the storage
shielding so you only have to undo the 2 back screws and life the back
top section of cover off, versus complete taking the entire unit apart
to get to the CMOS battery location on the motherboard.
Its a very modular design, everything detaches separately, just the
massive amount of shielding around everything makes taking it all apart
quite the task. This'll probably be one of the only pieces of
technology still working if an EMP bomb is ever detonated over the US ;-)
On 8/15/2019 2:51 AM, Ian Finder wrote:
I was under the impression that the internal hard drive on the 1537 is
SCSI and not IDE.
Careful, some of those pins have +12 power for the drive on them as well.
On Wed, Aug 14, 2019 at 8:49 PM Curt Vendel via cctalk
<cctalk@classiccmp.org <mailto:cctalk@classiccmp.org>> wrote:
Hi,
I’m doing some work for a friend who has one of these unicorns
it’s apparently a super beefed up CIA use the laptop that wound up
in Russia somehow and he got it shipped back here to the US
The motherboard was modified it looks like the hard drive was on
some kind of a tray going to a connector which is IDE compatible
Someone had extremely poorly soldered on an IDE cable in place of
the sled and over the years several of the pans of popped off and
they’re not really making sense as to the solder points they’re
supposed to go to. Complicating the matter is the paint outs are
not just a direct staggered 40 Pin to Pin connection several of
the through holes are not in use so just soldering on I had her
and plug in the cable into it is not possible also the pens are
staggered so that wouldn’t make it possible either.
So to cut to the chase does anyone have the schematics or the
motherboard pinouts for this connector so that I can do a proper
soldering job and put on a clean working cable so that this laptop
can vote from the IDE hard drive?
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