Thinkpads Forum

I'd like to boot a TP600 from USB, but as that option's not on offer, I'm going to try booting from a SD inserted into a PCMCIA adapter (which is hopefully currently on it's way from China) instead.

One Wiki entry reads:
"Booting from a PCMCIA device.
Many ThinkPads, even as old as some original Pentium models, can boot from a PCMCIA slot. The device must appear as a normal hard drive for that to work, and it must have boot code on the first block of the device. PCMCIA hard drives and some PCMCIA card readers (compact flash, SD, memory stick, etc.) will work for this purpose."

Now that sounds good in theory, but does anyone here have first-hand experience of booting from the PCMCIA slot ? There's info in the IBM docs about driving PCMCIA devices once a system has been loaded, but surprisingly nothing at all that I can see about the necessary conditions for booting from a PCMCIA device.

I have tried booting into DOS from a CF card in a CF-PCMCIA adapter. It was a long time ago, so I am not sure which ThinkPad that was.
Believe that it was a 755, but it is possible that it was a 600.

It is my impression that over the years, BIOS support for PCMCIA boot has been coming and going.
Many legacy ThinkPads has it, T2x does not have it, but T4x does have it.

I doubth that it will work with a SD card, for the reason, that SD cards are serial devices.
With a dumb PCMCIA adapter it will only work with CF cards and micro drives.

SMA wrote:I doubth that it will work with a SD card, for the reason, that SD cards are serial devices. With a dumb PCMCIA adapter it will only work with CF cards and micro drives.

I'm sure the SD being serial is reason enough, but finding a dumb PCMCIA adapter is proving difficult.
Having had no success with booting via the SD/PCMCIA combo (which identified a PNP device requiring a driver to be loaded by Win98Lite - so no good for booting with), I then bought a CF card, a Microdrive, and both PCMCIA and 44-pin IDE adapters for 'em.

Both the Microdrive and the CF card boot OK when inserted into the second drive bay (by courtesy of the 44-pin IDE adapter) - so I see no reason why they wouldn't also boot from the first drive bay, although I haven't tried that - but again, when inserting the CF/PCMCIA adapter into the card slot, the system flagged it up as a PNP device and installed the appropriate IDE driver. Bummer.

I'll keep looking around for a dumb PCMCIA adapter, and might even resort to making one by bypassing the electronics if need be. Either that, or leave the UltraSlimBay adapter thingy installed permanently.

I have a PCMCIA CF adapter from Kodak that says "PCMCIA ATA Compatible" and it does allow some ThinkPads to boot, so maybe those are the magic words.

FWIW, the device is a Kodak Picture Card Adapter.