I have a Gridcase 1520 286/10 2mb ram portable that I got off of ebay and I am looking for a hard drive for it. Now from what I see inside the 1520, it has an mfm/rll controller and two 1.44 floppies. I have found from various sites that only the conner CP-3044 and lower conner drives work in the laptop. There is a problem with this though. I see that the connor drives are IDE not mfm/rll. Also I confirmed that the controller is an mfm/rll, only mfm/rll floppy drives seem to respond, and the grid floppy drives do not work on the standard floppy interface now-a-days. Stupid thing to try, but I had to know. So what mfm/rll drive can I use on this 1520? Thanks!

I honestly don't know. How many cables to your hdd? 1 or 2? How many pins on each cable? What hdd, if any, is in there now? Skip

I don't think there's such a thing as an MFM or RLL floppy. There may be a hermaphroditic floppy interface on the Gridcase. Don't be fooled by the 34 pin cable on the MFM RLL controller. These controllers have one 34 pin and one 20 pin. BOTH are for the HD. Back to the floppy. I would not assume 1.44M ; I would get a couple of 720K DOS 3.3 disks ready. HTH If you can figure out either by looking at the chips or by running diagnostics, what kind of HD controller you have, that will tell you alot about what kind of drive you can use. I'd guess you can use any "conforming" MFM RLL HD with the caveat that an MFM drive usually will not format RLL because of the higher density. And if it does, may prove unreliable. One challenge will be to find a HD with a form factor suitable for that portable. M2 Mechanix2@Golden-Triangle.com

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/ata/cp3044.html These hard drive use a "TASK FILE INTERFACE" and I quote "Task File This is the name given to the I/O register interface used by MFM controllers. It refers to a set of I/O registers, or I/O ports and I/O port addresses used to program the controller." ... so really any slim drive with a capacity of around 35mbs will suffice providing it is compatible with MFM controller.

Well, it came with 2, 1.4mb floppy drives. How do I know this, because it booted from my 1.4mb dos 6.20 disks. I dont have a HD in it and I am looking for one. I guess it also needs somekind of interface card for HD use. The dual floppy drives have a card behind them that says "floppy (something) card" I dont know why it came with 1.4's instead of 720's, but thats what it came with. So how do I go about getting one of these HD/floppy backplates, or cards for the 1520. eBay doesnt seem to have them. I would love to just find the pinout of the connectors on the board, but the little floppy back plate has some IC's on it, and I assume the HD version would too. I love the thing, but finding parts is kind of difficult. Thanks!

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=56084&item=5148814821&rd=1&ssPageName=WDVW http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=1247&item=5148567935&rd=1&ssPageName=WDVW M2