not really a sega mod..

[GiGaBiTe]

i got a free ibm thinkpad 560x laptop and upon inpection of the external floppy drive, it was damaged. i completely took it apart to see if the inside was ok, but alas my hopes were wrong. the disk heads were damaged and only read about 500k of a disk.

so i looked for another teac floppy drive that was made around the same time, i found one in an old celeron desktop. but the thing was that the ibm has a custom goofy cable that connects the floppy to the computer.

so i sat there and pondered...

and i thought about removing the heads from the bigger drive and putting them on the smaller one. but that wouldnt work, size problems..

so then i looked at the floppy pcboard controler, both boards had the exact same pinouts for everything. so i removed the connections from the bigger floppy and took the controler off. then i took the smaller controler off the laptop hard drive and started jerry-rigging the connections to fit. but since i didnt have a soldering iron (i had 2, but they got misplaced) i had to go out and buy another one. so tommrow im going to start soldering connections and wires to make the thing complete.

the only thing im worried about it amperage and voltage draws / differences.

but if it frys you can get the drives off of thinkpadmedic for $24 anyways.

[oompa loompa]

i think you should just buy a new drive =). newer laptop floppy drives are wierd, in that they add custom circuitry because you can interchange between drives, eg: switch the floppy with a cd drive, or a zip drive. although i wouldn't say that your mod doesn't work. it could very well work, if they do have the same pinouts with the same functions. i also wouldn't worry about power usage, since you could take out the floppy, and stick in a cd drive, which eats much more power

[GiGaBiTe]

no, this was an ibm proprietary thing, it had the wierd cable and the whole nine yards. no cd attachments unless you used a backpack cdrom drive.

damn, it was very difficult soldering job the parts on the board were extremely small.

it took like 3 hours to do, and it worked for 5 mins and when i moved it a bit a solder connection bridged something and the thing fried. well at least it worked

i was planning to get a new drive for it when this thing blew up, they only $24 bucks.

[oompa loompa]

hey, it worked =D, that's a good thing to hear =P