On 11:55 PM 7/30/98 -0400, Jose E. Dominguez wrote:

>I hope someone out there can help me. I have a friend that has an old
>Digital 386 running mail sorting software on a mail sorting system. His
>hard drive is beginning to show signs of wear and tear and he would like
>back up the contents and transfer them to a new PC.

  Us DR Engineers say, "There is only two types of hard drives. The ones
that are broken, and the ones that are about to be broken." Please do not
take that quote personal, it was to let you know that hard drives do
breakdown and die. Well it seems your friend is beginning to know this.

>One of the problems is that the floppy drive is not working. I've taken
>the drive out of the Digital and installed it in another PC, used Auto
>Detect to setup the drive but I can't read it. This could very well be
>because the parameters used on the drive are not the ones that the drive
>was originally setup with. The thing is we can't get into the setup of
>the Digital PC to see the actual parameters, or check to see if the
>floppy is even setup. He was told that the problem is that the Digital
>PCs used a different format than the rest, he was also told that if he
>can find a Tandy 386 he will be able to see the drive contents because
>they use the same format. Is this true? How can we get into the setup of
>the Digital?

  If the hard drive is an IDE. You may want to checkout the jumpers and see
if the hard drive is set to cable select. If it is set to cable select, you
may want to change the jumpers to say single or master. If you do not know
the jumper settings, well check out http://www.blue-planet.com/tech .

>Tomorrow I'll go take another look at the Digital and get the model
>number and any pertinent information that might be needed to solve this
>problem. Meanwhile if anyone has any ideas/suggestions to backup this
>drive I'll appreciate it.

Good luck,



Tim Lider
Advanced Data Solutions              ICQ: 7562541
Web Site: http://www.adv-data.com E-Mail: Mailto:[log in to unmask]