IBM 240 (1999 Pentium 3 machine) Boot from PCMCIA CF Card?

[timbient]

Hiya. I recently bought an IBM ThinkPad 240 to play with. I bought it because I have a very similar looking Windows CE IBM WorkPad z50 that I am smitten with, but it is severely limited because of it's MIPS WinCE architecture (basically there's very little you can find to install because it's not ARM), so I just use that for writing Word Docs and spreadsheets.
Anyway, back to the IBM 240 I've bought. It seems fine and is currently running XP on a 20GB hard drive (I'm aware that 98 is what would have had). I bought it mostly to run SunVox on in a lofi way and it works well at this task.
I'd like to try playing with some lightweight Linux distros on it and have been trying to boot them from a CF card in a PCMCIA adapter. I had no joy with this and I'm not sure if it's possible? When I look at the 'start up' section in the bios settings, it can't see the CF card, but I'm unsure if this is due to the card I'm using, or if fundamentally it just can't do this. Any advice on that is much appreciated.
I've seen posts bout not being able to boot from it's old style USB port, but I've not been able to see anything about PCMCIA and CF cards.
In time I'm thinking of buying a mSATA drive and a 2.5 IDE adapter and running Linux on it, then keep the 20GB hard drive somewhere if I ever want to spin up Windows XP for any reason.
Thanks!
Tim

[solidpro]

It won't ever boot from the PCMCIA slot. At least the hard drive is easily accessible at the bottom - just get an IDE-CF adaptor, or similar and use that.

It is very very similar in design to the Z50. I think IBM were hedging their bets for ultraportable computing.

[timbient]

Thanks for your help solidpro.
For a combined cost of just under £30 I bought a 120GB mSATA drive, a mSATA to IDE adapter and a USB to IDE adapter cable.
I tried some light Linux distros, but in the end decided that I was happier with the fairly minimal XP it already had, so I cloned the old noisy and slow HDD onto the mSATA drive and I'm now just sticking with XP on that.
It's now much quieter, noticeably quicker and I have a lot more disk space!

[solidpro]

The mSATA adaptor worked ok then? It's good to know which machines will except SATA or SD adaptors. I tended to defer to the older and slower CF cards because they're essentially native technology to an IDE computer with nothing but a couple of resistors in the adaptor. The mSATA or SD adaptors are more flexible nowadays but I found various older Thinkpads won't see them (or see them properly). Or you go through a whole install of an OS and reboot the final time and find it won't boot!

[timbient]

Hiya, yeah I guess I was lucky that it worked then!
In case it's of use to anyone else that treads this path, this is what I bought:
mSATA to IDE Adapter: Docooler mSATA to 2.5" 44PIN Leg/IDE SSD HDD mSATA to Leg Converter Adapter Box
128GB mSATA: ORICO 128GB mSATA SSD, SATA III 6Gbps 3D NAND Internal Solid State Drive for Laptops Ultrabooks Desktop-ZH10
I see that the mSATA drive has now gone back to £15. I got it for less than £10!
USB to IDE Adapter: USB 2.0 To IDE SATA Adapter Converter Cable For 2.5 3.5 Inch Hard Drive.vp SN
The process for cloning the SSD I used wasn't straightforward, as I couldn't have the the new mSATA and the old HDD plugged in at the same time (without buying yet another USB adapter!), so I did it in two stages. The first stage was cloning the old HDD onto another spare standard SSD I had (with a different kind of USB adapter). I then cloned that SSD onto the mSATA.
The software I used was DiskGenius, which is free.
The plastic case/cover for the mSATA to IDE Adapter is slightly to big to fit into the space the old HDD was in, but I've found that I don't really need it.