CONVERT A WD CONTROLLER FOR TANDY USE
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I really hope that many of you, especially you Sysops, will capture this 
message and have it available for the day that a Tandy user comes to you and 
asks how to put a non Tandy hard disk into his computer.  I own a Tandy 
1000 SX, and I didn't want to pay Tandy $700+ for their 20 meg hard card. 
Well, here it is, fellows, I'm running a MiniScribe ST-225 40 meg on the SX's 
own 69 watt power supply, and I put the kit together for only $365.00!! 
Now I'm going to explain how you need to reconfigure a Western Digital 
controller card with a soldering iron.  I got this straight from the mouth of 
a Western Digital technician, that I called long distance to California in the 
middle of the day, and it actually worked!  Here's the hardware stuff: You must 
have a Western Digital WX1 controller card (the tech said either a WX1 or a 
WX2, I am working with the WX1).  Your card's BIOS must be 1.01 or higher. The 
card that came with the H/D was a Western Digital WD XT-GEN, forget it, take it 
back, exchange it, it won't work!!! Now the tough part: Heat up your soldering 
iron because you'll need it.  Find the "W7" area on the face of the card in 
the lower right hand corner.  You'll see that there are 3 solder points there 
marked 1, 2 and 3. You'll see that points 1 and 2 are connected with a thin 
solder trace on the card.  You have to break that connection.  It's buried 
under a layer of coating they use for protection on the entire card. 
 
I broke the connection using a stick pin and small pocket knife (I'm only 
telling you what I had available to me and it worked so don't get excited).  
The technician guy told me that Tandy uses interrupt 2 where IBM uses 
interrupt 5.  I suppose you could just run a "long" solder stream between 2 & 
3 but I used a little piece of wire.  A small piece of solder heated up and 
you should get a good connection.  Now the easy part: Make sure that you set a 
jumper pin across the number 7 pins on the S-1 area double row of pins. They 
are marked 1 thu 8 running vertically on the far right edge of the card. 
That's all there is to it.  I struggled with Tandy's technical people for help 
and with many Tandy users to find out how to do this.  I finally got the scoop 
from Western Digital themselves. Please pass this along to as many people as 
you can.