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BACKPACK CD-ROM to BACKPACK HARD DRIVE

VERAULT

VERAULT

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Jan 30, 2012
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Location
Connecticut, USA
I used to own a backpack Hard drive. I dont know what happened to it. I may have lost it, or it broke many years ago. I cant remember. I still have two Parallel port CD-rom drives which work (one is the backpack burner, external cdRw) and an external 1.44mb parallel Floppy drive.

Has anyone ever tried to replace the CDrom in a Backpack cd-rom with an IDE hard drive? Does it work with the original driver or do you need the HDD driver (or are they even different?). Just curious as I am trying to find a storage device for my old equipment.
 
Not alot of interest on this. But Just wanted to post I have tried installing a hard drive in the backpack external cdrom unit, several in fact as well as CF card adapters. Using all the backpack software I cannot get the unit to recognize any hard drive so I think its safe to say the Backpack CDrom innards differ from the External HDD innards significantly.
 
Oh im sure. Just didnt have any other options so thought I would give it a try., But you could swap the cdrom for another, I know that works.
 
This page seems to indicate that the Backpack hardware will support a CDROM or a hard drive, as they both use the same protocol. https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/blockdev/paride.html

If I was experimenting, I'd use a linux box with a parallel port running an older kernel (on an internsl HDD), get the parallel IDE driver to see the CDROM (even if it won't read a disc), then shutdown and then try replacing the CD with the hard drive.

That will prove the hardware, next problem would be finding a DOS driver that supports hard drives, and isn't too fussy about the fact that the parallel to IDE converter was shipped with a CD drive.
 
Well that sounds promising. Dont let my finding throw a wrench in that as Im working with limited hardware. Its certainly an interesting idea. If so it opens up storage options to these machines as there are plenty of these still out there.
 
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