> 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.
>
> 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?

Older Digital computers are slightly different than the rest of the
world when it comes to floppy drives.  Power was supplied through one
of the wires in the ribbon cable, and the pin-out was different from
IBM compatible computers.  You will probably only be able to use the
floppy in another DEC and, a regular 3.5 floppy wont work in the DEC.
In order to get to setup, you'll have to have the disk that came with
the computer - called SETUPS16, or look for that file on the hard
drive.

To get information off the hard drive - I use LapLink or make a
backup from a portable tape drive.

Cheri Periman