Windows on a PC110 via Compact Flash

[NeXT]

My Compact flash card FINALLY arrived and now I'm all ready to start installing Windows 95 OSR2 however before I get to that, I need to ask a question.
What is the largest Compact Flash card ever tested in a PC110 and what did you have to do to make it bootable? What will a PC110 do if if is given a card larger than it will allow and most importantly, will it complain about the filesystem being used or the size of the partition?

My second question is how exactly to get 95 installed on the card at all.
I do have a spare 2gb PCMCIA hard disk as well as a 150mb PCMCIA ATA flash card but I can't seem to make heads or tails on how to get that initialization utility to work so I can't make either of the cards bootable (and then just dump my Windows 95 cd and the boot floppy onto it). Instead I bought a laptop IDE to Compact Flash adapter (I have no desktops ATM that I could use instead but I got a pile of laptops) and am going to try and see if I can start the installation on the laptop and once I'm done with the CD drive I'll plug the card into the PC110 and carry on the installation but will my method work?
Man, finding help getting these things working is a royal pain. <_<

EDIT: I forgot to add that right now due to the fact that I can't find my external CD drive for my toughbook I'm limited to just a floppy drive so I have been messing with fdisk and format /s and right now it seems that if I'm single partitioning (make one partition and the rest of the card is unused) and formatting the drive to ANYTHING but the full capacity results in neither the PC110 (gives error I9990305) or the laptop (shows a floppy disk and a prompt to press F1 to boot from the floppy drive) being able to boot from the card. The opposite to this is that when I format the card as one giant 4gb FAT32 partition the laptop will boot fine but the PC110 just says Disk I/O error and that's it.

 

[NeXT]

Hmm, I think something else might be funky.
I managed to boot off the PCMCIA hard drive that came with my 730TE and apparently the onboard 4mb flash has the files needed to boot bot but just throws me "non system disk or disk error".
I have never run into this before.

 

[Bungo Pony]

I had to look up this computer to see exactly what it was. It's incredibly nifty!

I have a couple questions... Does it already have the CF interface built into it, or did you stuff one in there?

I personally would prefer to install some flavor of Linux that is customized to run on CF cards (like Damn Small). I've been successful in getting Damn Small to run on a 486 with 16M of RAM, but it was really sluggish.

The best I can suggest is take your CF card and adapter, and put it into another PC (with a CD-ROM drive) for installation. Install Win95 as you would do it regularly. When you reboot, MAKE SURE you shut off disk caching or else your CF card is going to crap out fairly quickly. Make sure you copy over any drivers you'll need.

Then, take the CF card (and adapter) and stuff it back into your PC110. Boot it up, and let it correct itself for all the drivers. Install the ones you need.

Personally, I'd probably make one of those a DOS-only computer, but to each their own

 

[NeXT]

Linux = NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Any release of Linux made in the last decade that has any mildly good applications is just too much for this computer.
Also, yes, there is a Compact flash slot built into the system. You can boot from it however you just need to make sure it's bootable.

Again, the reason I state I want to install Windows 95 is because I have a particular IBM PCMCIA 24x cd drive whose drivers only exist for Windows 95.
I was planning on installing 95 on the card using my 770X thinkpad (as it's one of two laptops I own that work somewhat and have both a CD and floppy drive) but I'm still waiting on an AC adapter to arrive.

Also, I considered DOS but Dan says that DOS is quite a hassle to configure and you lose the functionality of about 70% of the onboard hardware.

 

[blin2011a]

Reviving an old thread but do you still have your PC110?

Did you ever install the 4GB CF on her with an OS?

 

[kyodai]

Sorry for posting in a pretty old thread, but some info about CF in the PC-110 from me:

The internal CF slot lets you boot from a CF which is pretty nice. However, the maximum size you can use here is 2GB. I have a 2GB CF in mine and use it as the main System with Windows 98, so i have the 2 PCMCIA slots left for other useful accessories.

On a side note: In the PCMCIA slots you can obviously also use a CF adaptor and put much larger CF cards into it, i use a 16GB CF as a "data" drive. However, if you have the "big" CF PCMCIA card in it it might hang on bootup, even if you configured it to NOT boot from PCMCIA. I guess it checks the PCMCIA slots on boot and simply hangs. SO i have to take out the PCMCIA CF adaptor with the 16GB card, boot up and then insert it when Windows has loaded, then i can use the big card without problems.