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dual floppy GRiDCASE 1530 found, wiring a DOM module into it?

T

tschak909

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Has anyone dealt with a dual floppy GRiDCASE 1530? Wonder if it would be possible to put a disk on module inside it for a hard drive?
 
The biggest issue is that those GRiD's do not auto-detect their drives. They have a limited selection of supported C/H/S parameter drives in the BIOS ROM and that's it. Anyone who has wanted to replace the original Connor had to patch the ROM.

No I don't know how they did it.
 
I would say unlikely to work without BIOS mods like what Klyball has done.
Honestly cloning the backplate pcb for a floppy/hdd combo would not seem to be the most difficult task as an alternative to gutting another 15xx.
Doners are hard to find as it is.
Good luck
 
Things are what they are and they are not what their not, Myself would tend to think you may be better off keeping the two floppy drives being that bios only supports a limited set of hard drives. You can do a lot with that system if you make the A drive a system disk and use the B drive for everything else. Don’t know why, maybe because most of those old drives built back in the eighties are all thirty-five to forty years old now and they are not reliable. Back twenty years ago that was the highest failure rate on them of the drive becoming stuck and you had to whack the machine to get it going again so cannot imagine what it would be like today.

Got a couple 1530 systems and they used a large 10 meg drive that took up the entire bay. At least by the time you got to the 1550 they were using smaller IDE drives and thinking about it maybe the 30 used a MFM drive but can be mistaken.

At least with the floppies you can have a 720K system disk in the A drive with Grid DOS, utilities and maybe something like DOS Shell but you are not going to be able to load anything beyond windows 3.1 regardless what drive you can fit into a 30, the 1550 came with Windows 3.0 installed and a remember swapping that out for 3.1 but don’t think I ever saw a 1530 or 20 with Windows.
 
You're ignoring the simple fact that I have no problem patching the BIOS. There is even a reversed and commented disassembly of the 1520 BIOS, which is very similar. https://github.com/philip-searle/gridcase-bios/

I know how to hack the BIOS. IT just seems that I need to find a hard drive back plane from a parts machine (can even be a 1520).

So was looking to see if there was another method I was missing.

-Thom
 
Qbus said:
Got a couple 1530 systems and they used a large 10 meg drive that took up the entire bay. At least by the time you got to the 1550 they were using smaller IDE drives and thinking about it maybe the 30 used a MFM drive but can be mistaken.
Click to expand...
My 1520 has an IDE interface, but it's a Connor disk.
 
... It's kind of nasty that the IDE plug is on a backplane board you don't have, that's definitely a buzzkill. I assume nobody has the manual with the pinout you'd need to clone one without an original to copy. (Does the backplane board have any active components on it, or does it just passively route traces?)

If you do find the board here's what I'll say about those DOMs: the ones that are still being manufactured universally use the same chipsets as generic Compact Flash cards, so you might save a few bucks using either the apropos passive adapter for a CompactFlash card or ponying up a couple more bucks for a PATA to SD card adapter. (A high-performance "video rated" SD card in one of those adapters will be just as fast as a CF card.)
 
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