• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

HP 100LX PC Card help needed.

rygD

New Member
Joined
Nov 24, 2012
Messages
1
Location
NC
I recently purchased a 100LX for a "serious" purpose, but decided that I may as well try to play games and do other silly stuff with it. I have spent far too much time with no progress, so any assistance, tips or suggestions (that don't require another purchase) are welcome. I love this little thing, and I really want to use it for games and to make lovely music. So, down to business.

I have a 2 meg SRAM card, which is the only thing from my list that I can access from the palmtop. I also have a new knockoff PCMCIA adapter with 2 8 meg CompactFlash cards (both SanDisk manufactured, 1 marked Canon), a 32MB Canon (by SanDisk), a 128 meg by Cisco, and a 1GB SanDisk. All CF cards have been formatted as FAT16 on a Windows box, and the SRAM was formatted by the palmtop. I use strictly Linux and BSD at home, and recently got an old laptop with a PCMCIA slot running. It has Gentoo and Xubuntu installed, however most of my recent testing was done with Xubuntu. I can see when I have something in the slot, but I don't know how to put anything on it (usually I use the gui for this, and don't know where to check/how to mount the PCMCIA cards). No issues when I use the CF in a USB reader, but the LX doesn't want to play nice.

Turns out it is hard to find the hardware needed for all of this, and even harder to find the knowledge.
 
Funny, I was just playing with my 100LX this weekend.

It is quite picky with flash memory cards, but I have generally had good luck with sandisk products, I use a 32MB sandisk CF card in a generic PCMCIA adapter in normal use on mine, but have had troubles with anything larger than that, or many generic cards. I have always formatted any cards IN the LX and then taken them to my Windows PC to copy files to and from it (my main Win7 laptop is still has a PCMCIA slot, and my Win7 desktop has CF slot, both work fine for transferring files).

I also have a handful of 8-10MB sandisk PCMCIA flash memory cards that all work great in the LX.

If you can get any card that works to transfer files, you can copy the acecard driver to the internal storage from it, and then load it on startup, it will let the LX use some much larger (and broader range of brands) CF/PCMCIA cards.


Personally I just stick to a 32MB card that it natively detected (without acecard) because then I can boot from it and not worry about the driver getting lost if my backup battery dies.
 
Back
Top