If all you want to have is an easy way to move digital pictures from your camera to your computer without using the serial port, then this project will make you smile. I started this while my PCMCIA Adapter/A was making a trip to Germany, as documented here.

I had purchased a Microtech PCD-25BH SCSI PC Card Reader/Writer a few years ago, and it had sat on a shelf waiting me to have free time to investigate it's utility to the PS/2 platform. The PCD-25BH has a 50-pin SCSI interface on the back along with a standard molex plug for power. The unit itself occupies two SCSI addresses, as it has two PCMCIA slots on the front. One slot accepts only Type I or Type II cards while the other accepts Type I, II, and II cards.

As the PCD-25BH has a standard 50-pin SCSI interface, I used a plain-Jane Spock to connect to the unit. Before installing, I set the SCSI ID of the device to 5. There are three jumper pins on the bottom of the PCD-25BH. The SCSI ID that is set becomes the base SCSI ID, and maps to the bottom Type I/II PCMCIA slot. The upper slot will have the SCSI ID of base+1, so do not set the PCD-25BH's SCSI ISD to 6 if the SCSI adapter itself is 7 - you will have a SCSI conflict of huge proportions.

I placed the PCD-25BH in the B drive bay of an 8595, using a floppy drive tray to provide the mount. When the computer was turned on, the system programs complained about the modified system so AutoConfiguration was run. After that, Windows NT 4.0 booted just fine. Each slot showed up in NT as a removable media drive - similar to a Zip drive. Using a Compact Flash (CF) to PCMCIA adapter from SansDisk, I was able to mount the CF as a removable device on WindowsNT with no problems.

One final note: if you have not noticed by now, the SCSI PCMCIA devices that you can buy are only Readers/Writers. Do not put a PCMCIA device in that is not in some fashion a memory device. Inserting a network PCMCIA device will potentially ruin both the SCSI reader and the PCMCIA card.


Last updated on 07/21/2003