[rescue] Wanted ADTX adapter

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 12:12:23PM +0100, Gary Goddard wrote:
> I'm looking for a adtx 2.5" hd adapter to upgrade my 3gx If anyone has a 
> spare??
> Would consider hard disk as well.
> Does anyone know the maximum size hard disk that can be used with these?

There are two versions, an 8,000,000,000 byte (not quite 8 gig) max
and a larger one probably with the 130 gig limit. Unfortuantely I don't
have one, so I can't tell you about operating system limitations.

At one time there was a 2 gig drive limit for Solaris, I believe it
was long gone before Solaris 6. I'm not sure, but you may have
to partition an 8gig drive into 4 2 gig slices for Solaris 6.

I have a copy of the patches for Solaris 6, which can be used with a
standard version which should be relatively easy to get.

> Also looking for a copy of tadpole solaris 7.

Good luck. I've been unsucessful in finding one myself. I can tell
you from my recent experiences that you should NOT try to install
BSD on it.

NetBSD worked better than OpenBSD, but both had problems. OpenBsd seemed
to be a more likely candidate, and a new release is scheduled for November
1, so I'll be trying again in a week or so.

If you do an archive search on this group and "a boy and his tadpole",
you will see what I wrote.

Soalris 7 itself was very hard to find. While Sun eventualy released it
to the world for free (plus shipping) Tadpole did not. They bought a
license for it before it was free and therefore charged $500 a copy.

Not too many people bought it. Most of the 3GX's that are in circulation
today were bought by a company for their sales force and after buying
them scrapped the project and replaced them with other laptops (I think
they were Win/Tel, but I may be wrong). The machines were sold off by a
liquidator with the final price being $299, far less than a copy of
Solaris 7.

The hard drive adaptors you ask about were expensive and a few years ago
were selling for $150 for the 8gig model on eBay. Obviously, people were
not willing to pay $150 plus the cost of a disk drive to upgrade a $300 
(or less) computer with limited operating system capability (most modern
Solaris software requires Solaris 8). This makes them rare very difficult to
find them on the used market.

Another problem is that the memory is a problem. The memory in it is
5 volt parity SIMs. The best you can get is 32 meg each, giving you
64meg. If you are lucky and have one of the very rare 128m 3GX's then
your motherboard was factory modified for 3.3 volt memory.

AFIK no one has figured out how to do the modification on their own, nor
has anyone reported using 64m 5 volt SIMs (if they are even available) in
it.

Geoff.

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