Turning Off the Hard Disk Before Starting the Computer

If you are not going to use the hard disk at all, turn off the switch before turning on the computer. Insert a working copy of your Startup/Operating 1 diskette in drive A so that MS-DOS is loaded from that drive. When you turn on the computer, the screen displays this error message:

1780 - Disk 0 failure

(Resume = "F1" key)

Do not be concerned by this message; just press F1 to continue. Then use the computer as if it had no hard disk drive. That is, you perform all operations on the diskette in the diskette drive.

When you start the computer with the hard disk drive turned off, you cannot access the hard disk even if you subsequently turn it on. MS-DOS displays an error message if you issue any command involving drive C. To make your hard disk accessible again, save your data, exit the program you are running, then turn the computer off. Wait at least five seconds, then turn the hard disk switch on. Remove any diskette from drive A and turn the computer back on.

Turning Off the Hard Disk After Starting the Computer

If you want to use the hard disk at any time during your working session, start the computer with the hard disk switch turned on. After you have loaded your application program into memory, you may then be able to turn the hard disk drive off (if you do not need to use it). When you want to save your work to a file on the hard disk, you can then turn the hard disk switch back on again.

Note

Some application programs may not work with the hard disk drive turned off unless they are started from a diskette instead of from the hard disk. If you need to run a program of this kind and you need to turn the hard disk off to conserve battery power, use the diskette that came with the program and run it from drive A.

Using the Equity LT-286

4-19