--- On Tue, 4/27/10, PeterH <peterh5...@rattlebrain.com> wrote:
> I bought loads of Shugart 851 drives, for upgrading my
> Xerox 820 micros, some many years ago.
I did that on an 820-II. Xerox was a bit sneaky with the cable for the single
sided drives. It didn't include a wire for the side select pin. Since it was a
hand assembled cable using individual wires it was simple to move one of the
ground wires on the connectors to the side select pin hole and 'instant'
support for the double sided drives.
IIRC that also had to be done to the cable inside the drive box, no ribbon
cable with IDC plugs in it.
Xerox wanted to nail their customers a whole bunch more money for the special
double sided cable with one more wire in it.
Those computers had no method of detecting whether the installed drives were
single or double sided. They'd format "double sided" in a single sided drive
without verification and would even "write" to side 2 without reporting any
errors. Of course the problems came when trying to read the disk. For some
reason that didn't work too well.... ;) No more of those problems after
upgrading the drives.
--
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