Thinkpads Forum

Hello,

I have taken possession of 570e, PIII, without a hardrive, without a hard drive caddy, and without the ultrabase (that is to say without a cd).

I have a 600 and may eventually try its drive and caddy in the 570. However I suspect Windows will freak out upon boot up and perhaps trash my current software installation, leaving neither computer in running state without substantial installation.

In the immediate term I was wondering:

(1) whether the 570 can boat off of a pcmcia flash card or a compact flash card in a pcmcia adapter?

(2) what extremely small OS I could set up on a 48meg pcmcia flash card or 512meg compact flash card?

(3) whether an OS can be transferred by wireless network, in effect, streamed to the machine off another computer, each time after some minimal boot up on the 570?

In the short term I would like to test the capacities of the 570, with an eye to eventually migrating to it from my 600, once I have an ultrabay.

Any and all help is much appreciated.

Thanx,

cure

The 570 actually doesn't need the caddy as the caddy is nothing more than a sheet of metal that is there to make drive removal easier (uses same caddy as a 600) and since the 570 uses the same chipset as the 600/600E/600X (440BX), Windows should boot fine only needing to make slight changes for the new BIOS and slightly different hardware.

I'm not sure on the PCMCIA flash card however. There should be a BIOS option to boot from PCMCIA but I'm not sure if that'd support the flash card.

AlphaKilo470 wrote:I'm not sure on the PCMCIA flash card however. There should be a BIOS option to boot from PCMCIA but I'm not sure if that'd support the flash card.

There is a boot option in BIOS (Easy Setup) that allows you to specify the PCMCIA as a boot source. It least it does with firmware ITET55WW. Access the BIOS by holding down the F1 key while powering up, click the "Start up" icon, then the "Power-on" icon. Here you can define up to four sources for booting.

However, that said, I have not been able to get the 600X to boot off of a 64M SD flash card, formatted as bootable using Windows 98. I used "format /s [drive letter]:" in a DOS box to format and transfer the system files. I can see the two hidden files and command.com, but the 600X does not want to boot from the 64M SD card in either PCMCIA slot.

The real problem is getting a bootable image onto the flash drive in the first place. You can also check bootdisk.com for tools used to create bootable disks.

This was such an intriguing question that I spent some time researching it this afternoon... Here's what I found:

Somebody here at thinkpads.com says it has been done with a 560X:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=4604

This info from IBM's site:
http://www-306.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... K9QLZ.html

Some possibly useful info about booting off PCMCIA devices:
http://www.basterfield.com/pc110/PCMCIA.htm

Most of the references I found dealing with booting PCMCIA flash drives is with using Linux; not something I would recommend for the faint-of-heart.

rkawakami wrote:I used "format /s [drive letter]:" in a DOS box to format and transfer the system files. I can see the two hidden files and command.com, but the 600X does not want to boot from the 64M SD card in either PCMCIA slot.

It may be that there is no valid Master Boot Record on the SD card.
Perhaps FDISK /MBR might help..

-chuzz

No success thus far.

The 600 in the setup accessed via F1 at start explicitly permits the addition of pc cards to the boot sequence. The 570 has a more general entry for removable drives.

Neither my 48 meg pc card nor my 512 meg compact flash card in a pcmcia adapter where recognised by either computer in either pcmcia slot for the purpose of booting.

I had no success getting pccinit.exe to setup the cards. It kept giving me errors.

I tried a trick off of bootdisk.com for making usb cards bootable but that yield nothing.

I then tried the following from http://www.linux-hacker.net/cgi-bin/Ult ... 5&Session=

Step 5. Download and install the Ranish Partition Manager utility for editing a disk's MBR (master boot record), boot flag, and partition table.

Step 6. Obtain a 32 megabyte Compact Flash card for Linux or MS-DOS or a 256 megabyte or larger card for Win98/98SE/Me (preferably a 340 megabyte or 1 gigabyte IBM MicroDrive.)

Step 7. Obtain and install a USB or PCMCIA Compact Flash adapter to use with your main computer. The Microtech Zio! USB adapter is inexpensive, installs easily, and works well. The SanDisk SDDR-31 and similar adapters are more expensive, and don't seem to be nearly as easy to work with. Consider yourself warned.

Step 8. Insert the CF card into your adapter and re-boot your system. This insures that the partition table entry for your 'removable disk' is present.

Step 9. Open Windoze Explorer (the file manager, not the web browser) and you should see a removable disk entry labeled as drive 'E:' or higher. This is your Compact Flash card.

Step 10. Right click on the CF drive, and select 'Format'. Windoze and MS-DOS don't format the CF card in such a manner as to make it bootable, but this will insure that your card is readable, writable, and formatted in the first place.

Step 11. MicroSquish Windoze and DOS don't do everything correctly, so the Ranish Partition Manager program comes to your rescue. Open a command-line DOS window on your desktop, and cd to the directory where you installed the Ranish utility program. Enter the command part -d 1 which will show you the partition table for your hard disk drive.

Don't change anything on this screen, or your desktop o/s is hosed. Press the F5 key to skip to the next disk drive, which should be your Compact Flash card. You can tell by looking at the size of the partition in megabytes, just below the word 'Manager' at the top of the screen. A 32 megabyte CF card is usually about 30 megabytes formatted.

When you find your CF card, row zero should be highlighted, for the MBR/Master Boot Record. Press the ENTER key to edit the MBR options listed on the bottom right window. Make sure the first option is set to: Standard IPL. Press ENTER to return to the upper window.

Use the down arrow key to move to the second partition table entry, '1'. MS Windoze and DOS usually make this a FAT-12 partition, which is only for floppy disk drives. A bootable Compact Flash card will require a FAT-16 partition. Press the DELETE key to remove any and all entries from the table. This will not affect the data on the disk, only the partition table in memory.

Then, press the INSERT key to define a new partition. It will leave entry '1' as Unused which is okay. It will place your new partition in entry '2' and ask what type of partition to create. If your CF card is 32 meg or smaller, select DOS FAT-16 (<32M). If your CF card is larger than 32 meg, or you're using a 340 meg MicroDrive, select DOS FAT-16. Press ENTER twice to accept the default values for the partition.

Press the B key to mark the partition as bootable. This is critical to successfully using the CF card to boot the IA-1. You should now see a greater than > symbol in front of Pri.

Finally, press the ESC key to exit the program. When prompted, select Save MBR and press enter. Now, you're ready to put command-line DOS on the CF card.

Step 12. In your same DOS window, enter the command SYS E: to copy the essential DOS o/s files to the CF card. Be sure to use the correct drive letter designation for your CF card. This copies several files to the CF card, which you can review with the command DIR /A E:. These are the files:

IO.SYS
DRVSPACE.BIN
MSDOS.SYS
COMMAND.COM

But neither computer recognised the end result either.

That leaves the heady just from IBM itself to try.