Monthly Archives: June 2021

Recalibration Needed

The OS/2 Museum recently acquired two horribly slow old Western Digital IDE drives model WD93044-A. These were WD’s first foray into IDE hard disks, combining a rather outdated Tandon RLL drive chassis (3.5″ half-height stepper drives) with WD’s own controller … Continue reading

Posted in Bugs, IDE, Western Digital | 32 Comments

Can This Conner Talk?

As part of research into the IDENTIFY DRIVE command, the OS/2 Museum acquired two old Conner IDE drives, a CP-342 and a CP-341i. These drives look extremely similar at first glance, and they’re both 40 MB IDE drives, but on … Continue reading

Posted in Conner, Debugging, Hardware Hacks, Storage | 19 Comments

OS/2 6.304: Who Has More?

Yet another interesting item that I recently ran through a Kryoflux is a set of 30 floppies labeled “IBM OS/2 Version 2.0 Pre-release Evaluation Copy – 6.304”. In this case, there’s no mystery as to what it is: 6.304 was … Continue reading

Posted in Archiving, IBM, OS/2, Pre-release | 8 Comments

EISA Specification 3.1

While researching the Compaq Intelligent Drive Array (IDA), a circa 1990 EISA-based IDE RAID controller, I quickly established that there’s very little surviving information about it, and most of what there is can be found in two or three patents … Continue reading

Posted in Documentation, EISA | 19 Comments

WD1007V Commands

While researching material for a previous article, I wanted to examine the only AT-compatible ESDI controller I have, a Western Digital WD1007V-SE2. My board was made in 1990, the firmware is from 1989, and the controller was likely introduced in … Continue reading

Posted in Debugging, Documentation, ESDI, Western Digital | 3 Comments

Whence IDENTIFY DRIVE?

As most everyone knows, the AT Attachment standard (informally known as IDE) started by literally bolting the previously standalone AT disk controller onto a MFM drive with a ST506 interface and connecting the assembly to the host system with a … Continue reading

Posted in Compaq, Documentation, IDE, PC hardware, PC history, Storage | 36 Comments

OS/2 1.2 EE DAP

That same shoebox I mentioned the other day also contained three plain cardboard 3.5″ floppy boxes with a set of disks that look like this: Once again, despite the plain-looking labels, these are mass-duplicated floppies, which is handy because Kryoflux … Continue reading

Posted in Archiving, IBM, Kryoflux, OS/2, PC history | 2 Comments