On Tue, 30 Jul 1996 11:17:20 -0400 Michael Cammer wrote: Dear Michael We used to have a western digital scsi interface for a sony mo drive. When we switched it to an adaptec scsi interface everything was ok but the drive wouldn't read the old disks. This seemed like a pain but the adaptec is a much better (plug and play) interface. So I recommed it to you. As far as you archived data goes you would need temporary storage to move it all over to the new format. I know that might not be possible but it might solve the interface problems. I hope this helps... Mark Cannell > > This is not a query but a follow-up answer to our own question of about > two months ago. > > The Northgate 386/387 running CoMos for the BioRad MRC 600 died. We > temporarily got the system to run on an old Swan 386/387; it was as > simple as plug-and-play except that disk access creeped. Popping the cards > in a new Gateway Pentium with three IDE slots was also as simple as > plug-and-play (the difficult part was ordering a Pentium with three IDE > slots). We do get an error message when CoMos starts running, but > performance does not seem to be compromised. > > On the other hand, getting the old Sony SMO drive to work was not as > simple. Sony was unable to provide us with technical support for the > driver although they were very forthcoming with info on the hardware; we > called Sony because the company that wrote the driver software seems to > no longer exist. We have the disk drive running with the driver set with > the /p option which, buried in the manual says runs slower than using the > proper DMA settings. If anybody has clues regarding the proper DMA > settings, please let us know, we'd love to have the system run quicker. > > Anyhow, getting the confocal running on an alternate PC was easier than > we expected-- only four or five hours on hold for technical support. > > -Michael