I recently purchased a NeXTStation Mono(With keyboard Mouse and Adapter to connect it to a VGA monitor) and I am wondering where I can get an external CD drive for it.
Thanks,
djgraham
Original NeXT CD-ROM drives are probably hard to find. An Apple CD SC300 will work as well and should be easy to find, also many of the older SCSI CDROM drives (e.g., from Sun workstations) will work. In order to boot from CD, you will need a drive that supports 512 byte sector size (instead of the normal 2k). Many older Toshiba SCSI CD-ROM drives could be jumpered to support 512 byte sectors. The NeXT FAQ at
http://www.levenez.com/NeXTSTEP/faq.html has a list of older compatible drives in section 5.6.
To boot from CD-ROM, you will also need the 68k boot floppy, which is available from the file archive (
http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Software/NEXTSTEP/Floppy_Images/3.3_Boot_Disk.floppyimage)
-- Michael[/url]
If your CD-ROM is not original, then some CD-ROM drives may not support the R or RW media.
Please also have a look at some modern alternatives. As I described in the following thread, the NORTEL NTRH9105 works perfectly with my TurboColor (including booting). As a bonus it also works perfectly and boots with the HP 9000 and the SparcStation 20.
http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3434&highlight=nortel