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Anyone know if an old ps/2 machine will recognize a new floppy drive before I buy it. Or will I have to find a working one out of an old ps/2 pc to install in mine? It is a ps/2 model 30286. It uses 1.44mb disks.
If the machine already has a 1.44 MB drive in it, installing a new one shouldn't be a problem. A secondhand floppy drive should cost $10 or less.
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It has been my experience with PS/2's that a regular 1.44 MB Floppy drive will be destroyed by plugging it into a PS/2 because the power supply for the floppy is sent through the ribbon cable right along with the data. I think you should open it up and see if there is a separate 4-wire power cable to the existing floppy first. Yours may be different from the three I have used, or there may be some kind of work-around, but my own experience tells me you'd probably be need to get one from a PS/2.
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I opened it up & just looked. There is no four wire power cable to the existing floppy. Guess I can't use a regular one. These damn ps/2 machines. I like them except when something goes wrong with them, you can't just go a floppy drive/hard drive etc. You have to find another ps/2 machine to get the parts out of.
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Well, I think they are extremely reliable, hardware-wise. I have three or four PS/2 floppy drives, all of which work perfectly, the last I knew.
Also, I bought a PS/2 8525, with a floppy and no hard drive. This is one of those with the built in VGA monitor. It cost me $5 at a school surplus auction, so I opened it up just to see what was inside. Right behind the floppy socket on the motherboard was another socket that looked just like it. On a whim I plugged in an old 428 MB IDE hard drive. No set up required; the PS/2 recognized the hard drive and runs perfectly. The machine makes a great word-processor/assembler/compiler etc.
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No setup required. Unbelievable! You most always have to have that stupid reference disk to setup anything. You were lucky.
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Well, the first computer I ever bought came with Win95 installed, so I don't know alot about real old subjects, but would someone please tell me what a ps/2 machine is? I'd really like to learn
Thanks
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Well, Jane. Yes, I did need a reference disk. But I was not required to tell the system anything about the hard disk, ie. CHS... For 1991 that's pretty rare.
To Danny, a PS/2 was, I guess, IBM's answer to IBM clones... Make an IBM that's not IBM compatible, just to screw up the competition, or that's how I saw it. Anyway, the idea didn't really catch on. The PS/2 was a kind of platypus of IBM computer systems. As far as I know, they came in 286, 386, and 486 versions. It's about impossible to find any add-on peripherals because most of them used an MCA bus instead of ISA (Industry STANDARD Architecture). But some of them do have ISA buses, but your guess is as good as mine if you can plug anything into them without special drivers. There are a few webpages built specially for info on the PS/2's, and a websearch should bring you a fair amount of information (only nowadays PS2 means Playstation 2, so be careful.:) Anyway, in my opinion, they are still good for special purposes like word processing, or any purpose that doesn't require that you add any standard cards or memory, etc. I just got lucky finding one with an ide port, I guess.
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