Thinkpads Forum

Is it possible to install an operating system on the 701C without using a floppy/optical drive? For example, using a PCMCIA card? Are there any ways to let the 701C boot from a PCMCIA card?

I'm not familiar with the 701C, but depending what OS you want there are ways around it.

One method I've used on every Windows OS through XP when a machine doesn't have another boot device is to put the drive in another machine, format it, copy the install files and all drivers to folders on it, and then do a "sys e:" (or whatever drive letter you have it mounted as). Then you can chuck it into the machine, boot to dos, and run the installer from there (setup.exe for Win9x, WINNT.EXE for NT derivatives).

If the 701C will PXE boot, that's a possibility also, although depending on your technical level it may be more than you want to bite off.

+1 for removing the drive and putting setup files on it with another computer. Done it several times, although never on a 701C as the only one I've ever owned already had Win95 on it when I got it.

I don't think it is possible to boot the 701c from PCMCIA. That said, it's not difficult to install an OS without any external drive. For flavors of Windows, EasyMac308 has already described the procedure: basically, you connect the internal hard drive to another computer, make it DOS-bootable, copy all installation files over, plug it back into the 701c, and install from there.

I did it exactly that way when I installed W95 to my 701c. I have a floppy drive but that would be too painful and slow so I just attached the HDD to my desktop via IDE 40pin->50pin adapter and rest was a breeze.

Thanks for your helps, I will try it. However, can you provide me a more detailed description on removing the HDD? What is said in the HMM seems far too limited for me

701C Hard Drive Removal and Re-Installation Instructions

1. Close the LCD.
2. Remove the battery pack.
3. Locate the hard drive compartment (next to the battery compartment) on the left side panel.
4. Slide the hard drive out of its compartment.
5. Remove the 4 Torx-6 screws that attach the hard drive to its bracket.
6. Gently remove the old hard drive from the bracket's connector.
7. Carefully attach the new hard drive to the bracket's connector.
8. Replace the 4 Torx-6 screws to secure the new hard drive to the bracket.
9. Slide the hard drive into the hard drive compartment, making sure that it is firmly seated.
10. Replace the battery pack.

Okay now I have removed the HDD successfully.

However, another problem arises: I seem to have nothing to connect the HDD to!

Well how does a 40pin-->50pin adapter looks like? I have done some search with "ide 40pin 50pin" and got many things, but I don't know which should I pick. Maybe a picture please?

I have also noticed that 701C's HDD has an interface like that of a PCMCIA card. They look really similar. And Wiki says it's a 68-pin interface. Kinda confused now

EDIT: Confirmed that it is exactly a PCMCIA interface since a PCMCIA card fits in its place perfectly. I was brave enough to try to plug in a PCMCIA card loaded with bootable contents in place of the hard disk . And what comes next is the 701 doesn't recognize it as a HDD at all and returned Not Installed for Hard Disk in the BIOS, just as expected

Once you remove the hard drive itself from the caddy, it's just a usual 2.5-inch, 44-pin IDE interface. You can use the circuit board of pretty much any 2.5-inch USB-IDE enclosure and access it via USB. (The drive itself probably won't fit in the enclosure since it's 12.5mm thick.)

Thanks to you all!

Finally I got MS-DOS 5.0+Windows 3.1 to work on the 701C!

EDIT: Still a small problem...how can I get a driver for the PCMCIA slot for Windows 3.1?

Look here: http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/researc ... MIGR-60440

Edit: On second look, maybe not. Maybe the PC card manufacturer?

Well I tried the driver but the driver keeps saying something like "no card service found, driver not installed". I put the extracted folder in C:\, and then added a line to config.sys that "DEVICE=C:\PCMCIA\PCMATADD.SYS". And this is all what I did. Did I do anything incorrect?

My card is a Sandisk CF-PCMCIA adapter with a 256MB Sandisk CF card plugged in. Does this mean I should seek drivers on Sandisk's website?

BTW, some files of a fixed size of 165,024 bytes are always on my disk. I deleted them when there were three of them sometime earlier, but a new one was created later. They seem to be hex-number-named, without extensions. I don't think they are virtual memory files since I don't use virtual memory in Windows, and they are way smaller than the EMS or XMS size reported by the mem command. What are they?!

The PCMCIA slot on a 701C is a 8 or 16bit PC Card slot. It is not compatible with the newer CardBus adapters. That may be why your Sandisk adapter won't work.

I've only briefly used Windows 3.11 a very long time ago, and have never had to install the OS, or drivers for that matter, so don't know much about it. But, I think generic PCMCIA drivers are included in Windows and you shouldn't have to install anything else for compatible devices. But, what do I know?

Well, that card worked fine when the 701C was running Windows 98SE installed by the previous owner. I have done all these things, format the HDD, install a new OS, etc, only because I messed the OS up and the machine refused to boot. Thus I think the PC slot on the 701C accepts my card. I choose to keep the view that this is the driver's fault.

See http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/downloa ... D=DS002471 perhaps?

Keeping in mind that DOS/3.1x is 16-bit and Win98 is 32-bit, there may be some architecture challenges there. Maybe someone running a 701C with DOS could share their config.sys and autoexec.bat files with you to compare.