• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Will This CD ROM Drive Work On My IBM 5160 XT?

IIRC, the drivers require at least a 386, so most likely not. I tried the floppy backpack on my Compaq Portable (8088), and it was a no go.
 
I'll leave it to others to answer if the Backpack CD-ROM Drive will work on an 8088 processor. My guess is that it will do so with some fiddling, but would be very resource-hungry.

Are you just looking for the easiest method to get software onto your 5160? If so, you may want to look into some solutions here. You might find cheaper and easier solutions to do the same thing (although the parallel port CDs can be useful if you have multiple vintage machines w/o a CD drive, I personally wouldn't purchase it for just one system)

ZIP disks work nicely.... as does parallel port transfers with Laplink.
 
I *have* seen CDROM players installed in XT's before (back a long time ago, when there were still XT's in service). Before standard ATAPI-IDE devices, CDROM drives all had their own interfaces, so you'd have a Panasonic interface, or some other interface - so a CDROM drive would have it's own ISA controller board. One of those type of drives should work.

But... there isn't really much you can *do* with a CD drive on an XT. Any CDROM based software isn't going to run. I've only seen them used for reading data discs for custom business applications.

If you're looking to transfer data into an XT, use floppy disks. If it was meant to work on an XT, it can get into one on a floppy disk. If you really need a large disk, then a ZIP drive should be able to work, but I don't think the latest versions of the driver work on an XT.

-Ian
 
3.5 I mean

Yeah, I kinda figured. I was just giving you a hard time :D

You should be able to use do DD 3 1/2" (720k) on the XT's controller. There are some controller boards that will let you do the HD 1.44mb, but the most common ones will not.

The XT was really designed around the 360k 5 1/4" drive, and that's really the most reliable thing to use on these machines. Are you trying to run applications that won't fit on one disk? Does your machine have a hard disk?

-Ian
 
I have a 20mb hard drive
and a 5 1/4" drive but I don't know where to get blank floppys for it, also how do you tell what kind of floppy drive is installed such as 360k, 720k, ect.
 
Last edited:
There are lots of places online you can buy blank floppy disks. Off the top of my head, floppydisk.com specializes in them (although they tend to be slightly more expensive), and I have seen a few other sites that carry old types of disks. Of course, there is always eBay. A few minutes of googling should turn some up. They are not rare - not even close.

For a PC/XT, you want DS/DD 5 1/4" floppies. The drives in the computer are 40 track, DS/DD, and store 360k. High density 1.2mb 5 1/4" disks WILL NOT WORK. If you get a 3 1/2" drive on the XT, then you'll probably be using 720k DD 3 1/2" floppies, since HD controllers for those machines are kind of rare.

If you have another 360k 5 1/4" drive, you can hook it up to a more modern PC to make data transfer easy - but if you don't, you can always borrow the drive from the XT when you want to write disks.

For even easier data transfer, I'd suggest just getting an ethernet card and putting your XT on the network. Most NE2000 network cards work great in an XT, even if they're 16 bit cards (the extra fingers just hang over the slot), and the card will work in 8bit mode.

-Ian
 
My floppy drive doesn't look like the ones that are originally on the pc/xts it is about half the size, I don't know if that makes a difference
 
In theory, it would certainly be possible to write a driver to work with the XTIDE and an ATAPI CD-ROM drive. I don't know if anyone's thought much about it, however.

You could also network a CD/DVD drive on a more modern machine to your XT. The only big issue is that the network stack takes up a fair amount of memory.
 
My floppy drive doesn't look like the ones that are originally on the pc/xts it is about half the size, I don't know if that makes a difference

That's pretty common. 360k drives come in both half height and full height. The half height ones were VERY common.

It's theoretically possible that someone put a 720k (DD/80 track) drive in there - but not very likely.

-Ian
 
It shouldn't. Both those drives are high density. The controller in an XT talks to double density drives. Those combo drives are electrically the same as two individual drives connected together - only they're more unreliable since they used crummy little slimline disk mechanisms.

-Ian
 
So if I wanted a 3.5 floppy drive, it has to be DD and 720k? would I also need to buy another floppy controller or could I only have 1 floppy drive installed?
 
I've got a internal 8 bit cdrom that was working fine on my Tandy 1000sx. Should be fine with your IBM. I believe it's a future domain controller. And the drive reads cdr's just fine. Looking for 50+ Shipping for the set.

Later,
dabone
 
Back
Top