A few weeks ago (at VCFMW) a Tandy 1500HD followed me home. The hard drive was working at the show, but the floppy was untested. It naturally needed a new drive belt. The next day, the hard drive took a few tries to boot up the machine, and the day after that it no longer would. The seller really got the most use for that drive :D
So I ordered a CF adapter and a 32m card and they both arrived this past week. So yesterday I opened the laptop up, and about a thousand screws later, I had the floppy drive's belt replaced and a the CF adapter and card installed. After reassembly (didn't look like a very smart idea to try to fire this one up partially assembled due to the very short display cable. So the floppy drive works well for the most part (I think I have a combination of a bad USB drive and questionable disks; If I leave both of those out of the equation, this drive reads, writes, and formats fine), but the "hard drive" doesn't exist according to MS-DOS.
One thing I didn't do (should have, hindsight being 20/20) is plug the card into a reader and make sure it worked. FDISK and CHKDISK do not find the card. I am using DOS 6.22, so capacity shouldn't be an issue. I ran the 1500hd.exe setup program, but that doesn't have any options for the hard drive, aside from how long before it puts it to sleep.
Anyone have any hints, tips, or tricks to make this work. It seems like it'll be a fun little dos machine if I can get a hard drive in it. I'd like to eventually replace the floppy with something a bit more modern, but it's working for now.
Thanks in advance,
J White
So I ordered a CF adapter and a 32m card and they both arrived this past week. So yesterday I opened the laptop up, and about a thousand screws later, I had the floppy drive's belt replaced and a the CF adapter and card installed. After reassembly (didn't look like a very smart idea to try to fire this one up partially assembled due to the very short display cable. So the floppy drive works well for the most part (I think I have a combination of a bad USB drive and questionable disks; If I leave both of those out of the equation, this drive reads, writes, and formats fine), but the "hard drive" doesn't exist according to MS-DOS.
One thing I didn't do (should have, hindsight being 20/20) is plug the card into a reader and make sure it worked. FDISK and CHKDISK do not find the card. I am using DOS 6.22, so capacity shouldn't be an issue. I ran the 1500hd.exe setup program, but that doesn't have any options for the hard drive, aside from how long before it puts it to sleep.
Anyone have any hints, tips, or tricks to make this work. It seems like it'll be a fun little dos machine if I can get a hard drive in it. I'd like to eventually replace the floppy with something a bit more modern, but it's working for now.
Thanks in advance,
J White