XT ISA card to add harddisk to Sidecar?

[leofoe]

I have an A1060 Sidecar with a WD filecard and MFM harddisk. The harddisk is faulty, so I'm looking for a replacement.

Would a solution like this work:
http://www.malinov.com/Home/sergeys-projects/xt-cf-lite

[Matt_H]

Sounds promising. But remember that old PCs had a very small hard drive size limit. I think you'd have to get a drive smaller than 512MB.

[curtis]

You might check out the XT-IDE project.

8-bit IDE card with advanced BIOS that will accept almost any IDE drive.  It's a half-size card so will have no problems fitting in a Sidecar.

Andrew Lynch has been posting them on fleabay for $125 fully assembled and testing.  IF I remember correctly his ebay moniker is ajlynch.

Curtis

[psxphill]

Sounds promising. But remember that old PCs had a very small hard drive size limit. I think you'd have to get a drive smaller than 512MB.

Both this card and the xt-ide have their own bios rom, so the hard drive size is not a problem. You're likely to have a limit on the partition size, depending on what version of MSDOS you have (v3.2 was something like 32mb).
 
The only downside is you won't be able to utilise all the space, but right now with a failed hard drive he's not able to utilise any space. So it's an improvement.

[curtis]

Yeah, pre DOS 3.2 max limit was 40Mb.  I think DOS 5.0 raised that to 300-400Mb or somewhere in that range.

Drives that size do pop up fairly often on fleabay for (usually) not a whole lot of $$$.  Or, if they have garage/estate/boot sales wherever you're at, you can usually find older computers you can salvage the hard drive and toss the rest or part it out.  These are usually pretty cheap also.