I'm wondering if someone here ever attempts to replace the PA80 floppy drive with a higher capacity drive like the LS120? ...or maybe upgrade the floppy drive of any keyboard?

..rb


[This message has been edited by rhumba (edited 04-24-2002).]

The answer is no, I fear.

And here's why I think so...

The floppy in a PA80 is "PC Compatible". What you (and indeed a lot of us out here with PC compatible drives on our keyboards) need is a higher capacity device that has a standard PC floppy interface AND (this is the tricky bit) fools the keyboard into believing it is still a normal floppy disc. The higher-capacity devices on PCs such as the LS120 offer "normal" floppy compatability using the standard interface; the higher capacity mode of operation requires custom drivers to be loaded onto the PC to enable the extra capacity. This is not possible with a keyboard unless the manufacturer explictly upgrades the operating system to include support for the device; this hasn't happened so far to my knowledge.

Oh, well, I guess I can't have everything

The thought sparked when I took my PA80 hard drive out and reformatted it using my PC. It was formatted with FAT and only showed up with 1.99GB. I mounted on a board with USB and just plugged it to my USB port and formatted that way. I actually renamed all the files and organized all the directories within that drive to my liking (that's about 1.5Gig of stuffs!), and then save the new structure to the drive and remounted back to the PA80. It was then that I realized if I would had transfered that much data by way of floppy, it will take me forever! That's where the thought of higher capacity removable drive came in.

The horror of having to back up your hard drive via floppies is the reason that alternative interfaces are sometimes provided - like SCSI or USB - either as standard or as expantion options.

Having said that, I think you've found the easiest way already - remove the disc and put it in your PC!

I would have liked to suggest if this happens regularly that you add one of those "removeable disc caddies" to your PC; I have one so that I can fix peoples 3.5" hard discs without dismantling my machine. However, if your K/B hard disc is a 2.5" "notebook" hard disc, then you need an adapter to convert the 44 pin interface/power connector on the 2.5" drive to the 40 pin interface and separate connector used for 3.5" discs. On my PC this was a connector too far and the notebook disc was never recognised when I installed in via the cradle, but it did work when I took the PC to bits and hooked it up (via the adapter) directly to the IDE cable!

Have fun!

Actually, found an easier way. You just buy one of those external USB enclosure for the 2.5" drive. These enclosures are very easy to open. I just open this thing up and, well just leave it open. Inside is an interface board to work with your USB port. All you have to do with your PA-80 2.5" drive is to snap it in and out of this opened enclosure.

..rb

good call!