Unable to get IBM PC110 booting from PCMCIA storage

[nglevin]

I've recently come into possession of an IBM PalmTop PC110. While the unit came complete with recovery disks, it didn't have any storage besides the internal, 4 MB flash storage found within.

I'm trying to install Windows 95 on this computer. Unfortunately, I need to be able to boot into a partition with more free space than the 4 MB partition, and neither the internal partition nor a 1.44 floppy will do the trick.

To that end, I have a PCMCIA adapter for a Type I CompactFlash card. The card itself is 8 GB in capacity, and I've got another that's 16 GB. A smaller, 2 GB CF card is still on the way.

I have used this solution to help format the drives; http://www.basterfield.com/pc110/ATAinit.htm , which relies on a tool called PCCINIT to handle formatting. And I did use SYS D: or SYS E: from the 4 MB drive, and from a PC-DOS J7.0/V install floppy that came with the PC110. (D: and E: are the drive letters that the PCMCIA storage are assigned by IBM's PCMCIA drivers.) I've also tried to use the standard PC-DOS 7 "format" tool on several occasions, but it doesn't want to format the drive after it's already been formatted by PCCINIT.

Try as I might, though, I am completely unable to get these PCMCIA drives assigned drive letters at startup time by the BIOS. What happens is that when I start up the computer when these formatted drives are connected via the PCMCIA adapters, either I see "Starting up PC DOS..." or "Starting up Windows 95..." and then it freezes, regardless of whether I'm booting from the floppy or the 4 MB internal drive, or I see the stock "Non system disk or disk error replace and strike any key" message if I'm trying to boot from PCMCIA storage.

What is working right now is if I plug in the PCMCIA storage when booted into the 4 MB partition, which has drivers to support swapping PCMCIA cards without rebooting. It is assigned the correct drive letters, and I can read and write to the cards just fine. I just can't boot from them.

Is there another workaround for this that I should know about? Have any PC110 owners had any success in booting from CompactFlash via PCMCIA? What storage devices would be recommended for this computer, if CF via PCMCIA is out of the question?


One last thing. I am aware that this computer has a devoted slot for CompactFlash Type I cards, but every single time I add a card to it, whether while I'm running in the operating system or before I start up the computer, the system locks up. If I add the card before I start up the computer, the system locks up at the BIOS. I have not seen any reports from any of the PC110 websites out there regarding special measures to boot from that slot, and it seems that the majority of PC110 owners from a decade and a half ago were booting almost exclusively from PCMCIA ATA hard drives.

 

[NeXT]

I treat the CF slot as a non-hotswap slot. Mainly because my CF card boots the entire machine. Once Windows is properly running you can just use the freed up PCMCIA slots for a CF hotswap supported CF adapter anyways.
Yes it's true that you can completely run off the CF card (you don't even need the onboard 4mb flash disk) and it took me over a month to get it to work. The big requirement is to not use a card bigger than 2gb. It's a size limitation in the BIOS. Everything larger that I tried did not want to work.
When I did my install I didn't even have an external floppy drive. I relied on a second laptop (made by an OEM called Impulse and supported the PCMCIA drivers PCCINIT needs, so your mileage will vary depending on the laptop you have, if any). There were a specific set of steps that MUST be followed to set the CF card up. It's been a while but I believe these were the steps:

1 - Insert ATA card/CF card with PCMCIA adapter into Host Laptop (In my case that Impulse machine)
2 - With all your drivers and utilities on a bootable floppy (here's a link to a rawrite image of the disk I used) boot the laptop with said floppy.
3 - Run PCCINIT.exe and initialize the card. Do not format at this time. (I do not remember if you had to also run fdisk but if so, use the version on the floppy disk.)
4 - Remove the floppy, reboot into Windows 95 (do not use Windows 98 ). Open a DOS prompt and format the card. DO NOT FORMAT DIRECTLY IN WINDOWS
5 - Make sure you use the /s extension to sys the disk during the format, else use the sys command.
6 - Assuming you have Windows 95 on CD, dump the contents of the disc onto the card. Try and save it to a subdirectory so you can clean the system up later like C:/CD.
7 - Shutdown, remove the card, insert it into the PC110. Make sure the BIOS is set to boot from that slot first and let it boot to a prompt. If it fails to boot then you did not properly initialize the card.
8 - Run the Windows 95 install as per usual and point right back at the card. Following the completion of the installation you can move the WIN95 folder directly into your C:/ directory (It contains a handy bunch of cabinet files with additional drivers so you don't need to always insert the Windows 95 CD when you add new hardware) and delete the folder that contains the rest of the no longer necessary files (See the above recommended C:/CD directory)
9 - Run your usual post-install procedures lie installing drivers and software.

The only weird issue I ran into is that Windows insists on running disk compression even though it's not installed and in this configuration is not supported so it pops up an error during boot. It's non fatal so you press enter to continue. I wish I knew how to disable this. This procedure also worked for building an installation for my Badger rugged laptop (Too bad it has a dead pointing device. ) and my 730TE tablet.