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Compaq SLT/286 Hard Drive Replacement

H

HB1024

Member
Joined
Aug 27, 2019
Messages
11
Location
Ontario, Canada
Picked up a Compaq SLT/286 a few months back, tested it briefly after I got it and found that the hard drive was either missing or non-functional (or it works and I just need to set it up, I can't remember). I set it aside as I did not have time to work on it.

My questions are twofold:

1: How hard is it to get one of these things apart, and what is the proper procedure? I see some screws on the back and a few more screws under where the battery should go, but no real obvious doors or panels to access the drive. There are some fairly major cracks in the plastic (and the keyboard cable plastic is brittle and falling apart), so I want to avoid being too rough with it.

2: Any special considerations with respect to the hard drive? My plan is to install a 210 MB Western Digital IDE drive that's also been laying around for months. I've read in places that these have a slightly non-standard power connector for the drive that needs to be adapted.
 
As I recall:
  • The hard drive power connector is a 3-pin Berg plug on the other side of the IDE connector from the usual 4-pin Molex, so if the hard drive doesn't have a matching 3-pin socket you'll have to come up with an adapter.
  • The BIOS doesn't support a 'user' hard drive type, so if your drive geometry isn't one of the supported ones you'll have to use a dynamic drive overlay to access the full capacity of the drive.
 
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