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Curious about My supersport.

S

supersPORT

Member
Joined
Aug 18, 2007
Messages
48
Location
Delaware
Is it possible for me to replace my supersport's floppy with a harddrive, one thats not the same size as the standard HD, something like a 60 gig seagate i have laying around?
 
chuckcmagee said:
Well, you can't use the floppy controller cable with a hard drive. Pin-outs are totally different. It would physically fit but you would have to build a custom "ide chain" cable, where one drive is the master and the other slave. I have no idea what kind of cable goes from the ide controller to the drive. If it's one of those white totally flat ribbon cables, making a "chain" cable would be a challenge, at least to me it would. Those connectors where you have to push the ribbon cable into a slot can't stand a lot of reuse (putting cable in and out). And, .... finally, hard drives take lots of power, the on-board fuses would likely give up the ghost under the load.
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it has a port for idea already cause sometimes they sould have harddrives, so its not llike i would have to addapt anything
 
chuckcmagee said:
Oh, you mean there isn't a hard drive in there already? In that case, it is much easier. Still somewhat complicated. Are there those four position power connectors available or do the drives get their power thru the regular cable? It's very common to have the hard drive on the bottom with only one floppy drive above that. Of course, if designed that way, comes with a fancy mounting bracket to hold both items.
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befor you speak again, go on that site you gave me befor atake a look at the pics that show what it lookslike inside, if you know nothing about the computer i'm talking about you should not try to tell me what should maybe might kinda sorrta on some things be there.

sorry tosound rude but, its kinda annoying to have random specualtions with no background information, its like listenening to prez bushes speaches
 
I've never seen the guts of a floppy-only SS before, but I believe that the short answer in no, it probably won't work. The 8088-based SS uses a JVC hard drive that's a bitch to find these days, as it used a 'special' stripped-down IDE interface. The other possible problem is that the IDE hardware might not be present in the floppy-only model.

Later SS models used standard IDE drives, but were very limited in the drive types they would recognize.

--T
 
Terry Yager said:
I've never seen the guts of a floppy-only SS before, but I believe that the short answer in no, it probably won't work. The 8088-based SS uses a JVC hard drive that's a bitch to find these days, as it used a 'special' stripped-down IDE interface. The other possible problem is that the IDE hardware might not be present in the floppy-only model.

Later SS models used standard IDE drives, but were very limited in the drive types they would recognize.

--T
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Cool, thanks, I'll look online to try and find the right type, Your the first person on 3 sites to give me Actual, information, most of the other places just have jabbering idiots about "they never made laptops in the 80's you troll
"
 
Oh By the way, here's a cool trick to try. On a lot of Zenith systems you could use the command CTRL-ALT-INSERT and it would break into machine language monitor. There you can do all kinds of things like display, examine and search memory. Trace and unassemble programs, even access the on board diagnostics. Its all stored in ROM. I dunno how many Zenith machines this works on but give it a shot. :)
 
supersPORT said:
Cool, thanks, I'll look online to try and find the right type, Your the first person on 3 sites to give me Actual, information, most of the other places just have jabbering idiots about "they never made laptops in the 80's you troll
"
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I take it you haven't found the Vintage Computing forums on CompuServe? Doc Bogner hangs out there, and he knows everything there is to know about all things Zenith.

--T
 
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It only has a 10MB HD probably because it has quite the list to choose from so my guess is that it had a LOT of options and the previous owner went the cheap route. *shrugs*
 
Vlad said:
It only has a 10MB HD probably because it has quite the list to choose from so my guess is that it had a LOT of options and the previous owner went the cheap route. *shrugs*
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Check it with FDISK, there may be other partitions. I think the SS286 came with a 40Mb. Unfortunately, my 'eBay special' is non-functional, so I can't look it up for ya.

--T
 
OMG YAY I found an old quantum prodrive LPS 240mb drive in an old IMB 486 do you think it will work instead of the 20 meg?
 
I dunno, I suppose its worth a shot. I haven't poked around the BIOS options for the HD much yet but if it has the option to type in the drive parameters you could try but I couldn't really say for sure.
 
If the CTRL-ALT-INSERT key command works you can type SETUP at its prompt. If that key command does not work on your model, I'll have to look it up.
 
OK, after you press CRTL-ALT-INS it should give you a prompt. Type a question mark for the help commands or you can type setup to access the BIOS settings. That should work.
 
what exactly should it say other than setup or bios

help
boot from disk
color bar
display memory
examine memory
fill memory
execute
hex math
input from port
examine registers
search memory
trace program
unassemble program
setvideo/scroll
extended diagnostics
 
Aww crap. You're is different than mine since their different models. At the bottom mine has SETUP and TEST. :\ There must be either a keyboard command or setup disk. I'll see what I can dig up on the matter.
 
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