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From: mlg@cbnews.att.com (Mike Goodrich)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: Do it yourself Harddrives
Message-ID: <1990Aug15.123628.12944@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 15 Aug 90 12:36:28 GMT
References: <505@litle.litle.com>
Distribution: usa
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 37

In article <505@litle.litle.com> kevin@litle.litle.com (kevin p burke) writes:
>has anyone interfaced a pc style harddrive (mfm, rll etc) to work with a mac?
>a friend has a couple he picked up real cheap and was wondering if it could
>be done...also what is involved in writing a driver for such a beast?

Yes, you can interface a pc style drive to a Mac.  You can use the Adaptec
4000A SCSI conversion board.  This board will allow you to use an ESDI 
disk drive on a SCSI bus.  The are a few things you need to know about 
though.  You need an OEM guide for both the Adaptec 4000A controller and
for the ESDI disk drive you are using.  The reason you need these documents
is you need to know things like the number of heads, cylinders and blocks 
per cylinder the disk drive uses and also you must know the various command
opcodes that the Adaptec controller uses.

The driver software is available from most of the big archives like sumex or
simtel.  There are a couple of different software packages that you can use

I have tryed the following software drivers  with some success:

1. The Vishniac SF&I (SCSI Formating & Initialization) tools (pretty good docs)
2. The Apple Compter PD source code example for a scsi driver.
3. The Silverlining disk management software available for LaCie for
   $99.00 (includes shipping)

My current setup is a Mac Plus with 2.5 MB a 20MB GCC FX20 Harddisk and
a do it your self 80MB Micropolis 1355 ESDI disk controlled by an Adaptec 
4000A.  This project took me about 3 months to complete (when I started I 
knew nothing about how to do it) but it was worth every minute of it.  
One real good source of information was the Computer Shopper article 
about how to build your own SCSI disk drive.  (I don't recall the 
issue that this article appeared in.)



			Good Luck
			Mike Goodrich
			mlg@cblph.att.com