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CONVERT A WD CONTROLLER FOR TANDY USE
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I really hope that many of you, especially you Sysops, will capture this
message and have it available for the day that a Tandy user comes to you and
asks how to put a non Tandy hard disk into his computer. I own a Tandy
1000 SX, and I didn't want to pay Tandy $700+ for their 20 meg hard card.
Well, here it is, fellows, I'm running a MiniScribe ST-225 40 meg on the SX's
own 69 watt power supply, and I put the kit together for only $365.00!!
Now I'm going to explain how you need to reconfigure a Western Digital
controller card with a soldering iron. I got this straight from the mouth of
a Western Digital technician, that I called long distance to California in the
middle of the day, and it actually worked! Here's the hardware stuff: You must
have a Western Digital WX1 controller card (the tech said either a WX1 or a
WX2, I am working with the WX1). Your card's BIOS must be 1.01 or higher. The
card that came with the H/D was a Western Digital WD XT-GEN, forget it, take it
back, exchange it, it won't work!!! Now the tough part: Heat up your soldering
iron because you'll need it. Find the "W7" area on the face of the card in
the lower right hand corner. You'll see that there are 3 solder points there
marked 1, 2 and 3. You'll see that points 1 and 2 are connected with a thin
solder trace on the card. You have to break that connection. It's buried
under a layer of coating they use for protection on the entire card.
I broke the connection using a stick pin and small pocket knife (I'm only
telling you what I had available to me and it worked so don't get excited).
The technician guy told me that Tandy uses interrupt 2 where IBM uses
interrupt 5. I suppose you could just run a "long" solder stream between 2 &
3 but I used a little piece of wire. A small piece of solder heated up and
you should get a good connection. Now the easy part: Make sure that you set a
jumper pin across the number 7 pins on the S-1 area double row of pins. They
are marked 1 thu 8 running vertically on the far right edge of the card.
That's all there is to it. I struggled with Tandy's technical people for help
and with many Tandy users to find out how to do this. I finally got the scoop
from Western Digital themselves. Please pass this along to as many people as
you can.