Re: Lucky hack

Article: 7406 of alt.hackers
From: btomlin@crl.com (Bruce Tomlin)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: Lucky hack
Date: 17 Feb 1995 16:49:24 -0800
Organization: San Antonio, TX
Lines: 39
Approved: nobody
Message-ID: 3i3g6k$95r@crl2.crl.com
Reply-To: btomlin@aol.com
NNTP-Posting-Host: crl2.crl.com
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]
Status: RO

Michael Lea (mikelea@access.digex.net) wrote in alt.hackers:
>the cable that was in there did not have the right connections on it so I
>could swap the drives.  So I search around for awhile and can't find the
>right cable...so I decide to just swap the 3.5 drive out and put in one
>with a card edge connection.  Except the only 3.5 drive I can find is one

I would have done the simpler and more elegant solution:  change the
drive select jumpers on the drives themselves.  Those newfangled
"flip"
cables are for wussies.  REAL hackers use the drive select jumpers.

ObHack:

Last year, the internal floppy drive in my Mac IIci died, and after a
couple of months of procrastination (the immediate solution was to buy a
cheap Powerbook and fileshare the files to floppies) I bought a used
drive.

Since I prefer to keep my machine on 7/24, partly because I don't like to
wait for it to start up all the time and mostly because I like to keep
stuff in my 14 meg ramdisk (I can keep one running for months), I didn't
want to open the case.  (In fact, you have to remove the power supply to
get access to swap the floppy drive.)

So what I decided to do was rig up the new drive as an external drive.  It
turned out that the cable from my old 400k drive worked perfectly.  Then I
needed a case.  I started with a 3 1/2" floppy drive mounting bracket for
a PC (with a gaping hole for the front of a normal 3 1/2" PC drive) and
screwed the drive to that.  I still needed a lid for it, and here's where
the real hack comes in.  I had a dead PC power supply that just happened
to be the right size on top, and I put that over the drive and bent the
ends under.  Then I duct taped it to the front plate on the mounting
bracket.

It was a bit ugly, but it worked until the other day when I accidentally
bumped the power cord out of the back of the computer, and finally got
around to putting it inside the computer.  Fortunately it has a plastic
dust cover "condom"  around it, because the old drive was Dust Bunny
Central.  The old drive goes back into my hacked case after it gets
repaired... eventually.

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