HP 16500 C Hard Disk Upgrade

I decided to take the time to upgrade the hard drive in my HP 16500 C model mainframe test instrument.  I was able to find a very helpful information on a few sites. Such as the K04BB Wiki, OpenGPIB, KD8TBD's Blog, and Philip Pemberton's website.  This helped me decide to try the upgrade of the hard drive to a compact flash card.  I purchased a StarTech Adapter, BR &TD 256 Meg Compact Flash card, and a SanDisk 512 Meg Compact Flash card.  I also purchased a SD card to IDE adapter, to experiment and try.

After I unhooked the IDE drive and hooked up the SD card adapter the hard disk test failed on boot, as expected.

hard disk boot test failure.

The SD card adapter and SD card was recognized by the mainframe, but it timed out while trying to format.  You can (sort of) see that I have it hooked up in the picture below.  The fact that it tried to format the SD card as a drive was promising.  I really thought it might work, but it timed out, then locked up. Failure!  That's okay, I still had the Compact Flash card adapter to try out.

SD Card adapter experiment.

I unhooked the SD Card adapter and hooked up the Compact Flash card adapter.  

Compact Flash adapter experiment.

The mainframe recognized the "hard drive" again and this time actually formatted it!  Success!  Immediately I started copying over the Operating System files for the mainframe and the test files.  

Copying Files to Compact Flash "Hard Drive".

Once the files were all copied over, it was time to reboot the mainframe.  I removed the floppy disk that it booted the machine and reset the power button.  Just as I hoped, there was a passing hard drive test.  

Passing Hard Drive boot test.

The mainframe booted into the OS from the compact flash card, I ran all the tests and they passed.  Now all I had to do was tidy up the install of the compact flash adapter and button up the mainframe. 

Compact Flash Adapter installed.

Once the adapter was securely attached to the same location that the original hard drive was, I put all the covers back on.  This last picture is the HP 16500 C mainframe running off the new "hard drive" while the old hard drive is sitting next to it.  I never actually tested to see if the SanDisk Compact Flash card would format and work.

Mainframe with old hard drive out.