Ay yo, welcome. This is a great place. Though at first I thought it was a bunch of "know-it-alls" who didn't want to help you. Comments like "read the manual" and "do a search on it, there are several posts about it..." were prevalent when I first got here. But if I have to do it myself I'm going to break this place of that stuff. Nobody wants to do a search all the time and read though several pages of a post to get an answer. So hey, you best beleive if I know the answer to a question I'm gonna answer it to the fullest every time it's asked. Word.
In fact, I highly recommend installing an MCD (multi-cardreader) in your machine. I was cursed with losing data with ZIP disks so I installed the MCD recently. Here's my spill on it.
This is what I did as far as buying and installing a cardreader in my MPC2000XL:
VST
http://www.vstservice.com sells the entire MCD cardreader kit for around $150.00 plus shipping.
Don't buy the whole kit. You can purchase the cardreader drive from the place I listed below. You only need to purchase the IDE data (ribbon) cable and IDE power cable from VST. You will need to call them to order it. The cables will cost you about $32.00, $16.00 for data cable & $10.00 for the power cable, plus shipping. The advantage of buying these cables from VST is that you won't have to do any of the wire cutting and soldering of the power cable that you'll find described in some installation instructions. Their cables are "plug-n-play".
I purchased the MCD(cardreader drive)from Synchrotech
http://www.synchrotech.com/products/card-rw_32.html for about $51.00.
With both of these companies the product was shipped immediately and I received them in about 3-4 days.
Suggestion(really a must): Purchase a Compact flash card and another of the types of cards that the MCD reads. You'll want to be able to test both slots after installing the MCD.
Installation instructions:
I know fools already know that you need to unplug the power to your MPC first, right?
Remove the screws from around the edge of the bottom panel.
Remove the two machine screws that are in the valley/indent on the bottom.
Remove the bottom panel
Disconnect the floppy drive's power and ribbon cable from the circuit board. (you'll have to cut the tie holding the cables together unless you want to leave the floppy power cable chillin in your MPC, if you do leave the cables, you also have to disconnect the power cable from the floppy drive).
Remove the 2 other machine screws near the front of the drive, and slide the drive out.
Before you connect the power and data cable to the MCD make sure the MCD drive's jumper is set properly.This is important because the drive will only read and recognize the compact flash slot and ignore the other slot if the jumper is not set properly. Trust me, you'll want to make sure you set the jumper properly before you close your machine back up.
Here's a picture of the jumper:
Note: The back of your drive may not look exactly like this picture but the jumper should be located in this spot.
The jumper is circled. It basically connects two of the pins on the back of the drive. It slides off like a pen-cap (use needle-nose pliers to slide if off and on. And son, it slides off and on easy, so don't be yanking and twisting shit. If you have to wrestle with this little cap then something ain't right. But I'm sure you won't have any problem). There’s 2 pins that it slides onto (it has 2 holes) Slide it vertically onto the two pins closest to the ribbon cable. So it should look like this:
POWER : [:] RIBBON
the : are the pins and the [] is the jumper on the pins. So from left to right its: Power cable, empty pins, jumper on pins then ribbon cable. Now attach the power cable to the MCD drive. Attach the ribbon cable to the MCD drive.
Slide the drive in. Attach the power cable to where the floppy power was connected. Attach the ribbon cable to the socket that the floppy WAS NOT connected to. Connect it to the longer socket to the right (if the front of the machine is toward you).
Test your MCD before you put everything back together. Screw in at least one screw that holds the MCD drive to the MPC, flip your machine up-right, power it up and test the drive. Make sure that it's recognizing both slots.
Put everything back together, but replace the other 2 machine screws in the valley/indent with the shorter supplied machine screws.
well upgrading my os to 1.2 allowed win xp to see the cf card when it was formatted in the mpc2kxl. that was easy and it saved me half of a gig of memory.
