Very slightly OT: Mechanical construction question about external internal drive mounting

[Norm Dresner]

It's not really OT because it's definitely mechanically architecturally
related and it is an embedded system.

I have a very large and complex rack-mounted box which contains a 14-slot
ISA bus passive backplane [physically divided into 2 separate PC segments]
and 12 cards of various sorts installed. The box has physical room for
mounting 3 drives in the front opening in which I have a floppy and 2
removable HD frames for one of the PC's and I have internally mounted a
permanent HD and made a cutout in the back panel for a floppy for the second
PC in the box. Everything works well ... Until I need to attach a CDROM
drive to one of the PC's. Currently I've got the cables from the secondary
IDE controllers and a power cable hanging outside the box and I simply hang
a CDROM drive (or a temporarily needed HD) from the cables. That's ugly
and, even though it's a very low traffic area, still quite unstable and
probably unsafe as well.

SO .. Does anyone know of a reasonable way to "mount" IDE internal HDs &
CDROMs externally?

TIA
Norm

[Mike Cowlishaw]

Norm Dresner wrote:
> It's not really OT because it's definitely mechanically
> architecturally related and it is an embedded system.
>

> SO .. Does anyone know of a reasonable way to "mount" IDE
> internal HDs & CDROMs externally?

External cases for drives are quite widely available.

But why not ditch the floppy and mount the CD there?
You can boot from the CD drive if necessary.

(It's over two years since I last used/needed a floppy
disk...)

mfc

[Jules]

Or ditch IDE and use SCSI - I've got the system drive in the case under
the desk, then the CD burner, DVD-ROM, and a second drive that I use for
backups up on the top of the desk where I can easily get at them (oh, and
a SCSI scanner, but I hardly ever use that)

The internal system drive's a U160 to keep the speed up; all the external
stuff's on a fast/wide bus where speed isn't so critical (and so I can
use long cable lengths)

(thing that annoys me is that the motherboard's an A7V and even with the
IDE controller disabled in the BIOS it still insists on hogging an IRQ
line, grr!)

[Norm Dresner]

"Jules" <julesric...@rc1.vip.ukl.yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:cah_000...@mmc.et.tudelft.nl...

I can't completely ditch IDE because I've got to maintain as much
compatibility as possible with the target systems and while it really
doesn't make all that much difference in a Linux or Windows system, it
completely changes the memory footprint of an MS-DOS system which I have to
use regularly [and create new HDs periodically too] to support several
embedded systems I'm responsible for.

Norm

[Norm Dresner]

"Mike Cowlishaw" <m...@uk.ibm.com> wrote in message
news:cah_000...@mmc.et.tudelft.nl...

I've actually considered that -- and I just might if I ever take the time to
create an MS-DOS bootable CDROM but I use floppies to rescue systems
probably on the order of at least once a week on the average and usually
several times when I'm setting up a new system which I do pretty regularly
here with 12 computers scattered around the room, in 19" racks, and just
getting in the way. Another regular use of booting a floppy is to make
"active" an MS-DOS partition on a newly created HD to make it bootable --
yes, unfortunately I do have to support several embedded MS-DOS-based
systems and I'm making a new HD every few months.

Norm

[Andy Holt]

Norm Dresner wrote:
...

>
> SO .. Does anyone know of a reasonable way to "mount" IDE internal HDs &
> CDROMs externally?
>

Can you use either a "Backpack" unit (parallel port connection) or USB?
Adaptors for either to IDE are available.

Andy