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DataStor Commuter Parallel Port IDE HDD

This came in a bulk eBay purchase months back but I only just re-discovered in a box today. I love surprises! I've recently been going through all the boxes'o'shite and so I'm sure there'll be more surprised to document.

It came in a pleather pouch with a manual, floppies and all required cables. Below you can see the DC power adapters actually piggy-back onto either an AT Keyboard socket or a PS/2 port. Very handy! I am still trying to work out if plugging my mouse into the piggy-back pushed pins inside my mouse's plug, or if it was just ready to break. Either way, had to fix that also.

The unit actually allows the printer port to pass through, but I didn't test this. I might grab a parallel port Zip Drive and see if you can daisy chain them. Otherwise I assume you can put a printer on the end.

As for operations, the floppies included had expired, so I downloaded the driver package for Windows/NT/OS2/DOS and created a bootable floppy disk image with the required DOS tools. The main driver is CDISK.SYS and this just needs a standard DEVICE line in CONFIG.SYS with no arguments. It's all on the floppy image above.

With the floppy in the drive, the disk came straight up and prompted me to partition/format it. It saw a 3.2gb HDD inside and told me to make two separate partitions of 2048mb and 1248mb, as the OS doesn't support disks bigger than 2gb! Ah, history.