[SPARCbook] Sparcbook 1 and disks

[Emanuelsson Paer]

Well, in order to generate a bit more traffic and provide fodder
for the archives, I might summarize what I've been up to lately.

As some of you may remember I wrote some posts on the difficulties
of replacing the internal disk on my SB1.  As you might know, the SB1
uses IDE drives so there's an abundance of possible candidates.
However, the disks I tried (IBM 800 MB, Fujitsu 4GB) did not work.
The SB hung as soon as it probed the disk and I could find no
obvious problem.  Naturally tried all the settings of master/slave,
changed cable, etc.  No luck.  And yes, the disks itself were ok.

Then on a whim I bought an old Hitatchi (I think) 700 MB disk
on eBay and this unit worked right away!  The SB monitor probed
the disk, said it had a faulty label, relabeled it and that was
that!  Why this didn't work with the other disks I can't say.  It
can't have anything to do with the previous data on the disks
as the working disk had been used with Windows as had one of
the non-working ones.

So now I have a working SB1 with some more disk.  Unfortunately the
battery has lost a few cells -- only has 9V fully charged.  If anyone
would happen to have a spare...?  Or tips on repairing it.

Cheers - Pell