Thinkpads Forum

I'm wanting to keep my 701 hard drive as is (it's still got the preinstalled PC-DOS and Win 3.1) and use a CF card as substitute. It's the best option out there as far as I can tell

Unfortunately I believe the CF card I'm trying may be too large, it's 8gb. I've read that 2.1gb definitely works and I'd expect it to allow higher but the BIOS doesn't acknowledge a hard disk at all when using this CF. Strange this is I can boot Linux or Free DOS from floppy and it access the CF card fine.

Is there anything I should know? If someone's had luck with 8gb CF cards on these I'd be interested to read your experience. I've got one of those simple PCB convertor's and have used it fine on an younger computers so I'm happy enough this isn't at fault.

There is a thread in this forum on the 760 and 8GB CF cards... I have had luck with them... but only when using grub to load linux or bootstrap DOS.

4GB works fine for DOS/WIN but you need FAT16 for the IBM hibernate file.

I've got myself a 4gb Transcend 133x CF at your reccomendation from the other thread

If I'm right in thinking, I can get grub installed and the BIOS will boot grub... I did actually have grub on the 8gb card and despite the BIOS claiming there is no hard disk it would find Grub and attempt to boot. The 8gb CF was already partitioned with FreeDOS and Linux but Grub would fail with error 15 iirc (whatever the error is for no disk present).

I've tried the factory fresh 4gb CF formatted to Fat32 and booted FreeDOS from floppy. I can write to the disk and fdisk recognises it so I'll attempt to get a hibernate partition going and write back soon!

I think I'll probably end up running Linux from the same partition as Dos at this rate, but we shall see...

OK so soon turned out to be a couple of months. I did a lot of messing around after the last post and shelved the project but I'm feeling the urges to get it back up and running again.

The 4gb Transcend is causing me headaches. With FreeDOS booted from floppy I managed to partition the CF card so it had a Fat32 partition for the most with small Fat16 partition (45mb I think) at the end. The laptop must have been aware of the Fat16 partition as it did not complain at the lack of one at boot which it normally does.

However the trouble is when I come to write anything to the Fat32 partition I got errors and the file names would turn to garbage. Has anyone seen this behaviour?

I'm going to try the CF card in a different laptop so that I can install FreeDOS to it from CD, with the proper partitions and grub etc... Hopefully this will boot on the 701.

Not knowing too much about the intricacies of running a 701c, why bother with a hibernation file?
Can't you just switch it off?
I only worked on the hardware, the HD of that machine had a working W95 on it.