Hi again,

Lately I've been running my 2/10 without the Widget inside. I took it out because I wanted to exhibit the machine away from my house, and I figured the Widget was just too fragile to transport. In its stead, I'm using an external IDEfile hooked up to a parallel port card. The silence is nice (my IDEfile uses a CF card); so is not having to worry about a 31-year-old spindle eating a bearing while you're running the machine.

I haven't replaced the Widget yet, but I'd like to---the Lisa is a good place to keep it. The thing is that I'd also like the ability to switch between having the drive operating or disabled. It's not too hard to pull out the disk cage and connect/disconnect the power and data cables, but it would be much better if I could lift up the front cover and toggle a switch instead.

I'm not sure what would be required for that to work, but my recollection is that it can't be as simple as putting a switch between some/all of the power lines and the drive. I think I once tried disconnecting just the power connector (and not the data ribbon cable), and the green drive LED lit up anyway, even though the drive mechanism was still. If that memory is accurate, some of the data cable's lines must also need to be disabled to truly leave the Widget "off".

Does anyone here know more about this, or have any thoughts about this idea?

Thanks,
--Tom