Thinkpads Forum

I was hoping that anybody with a Thinkpad 701c / 701cs with a working PCMCIA CD-ROM drive on there can probably list the model name and product numbers of the CD-ROM drive, whatever is necessary to identify it on the google search, etc.

Reason being, I bought a generic PCMCIA CD-ROM off of Ebay, and my 701c thinks it's ATA hard drive. So, now searching for drives that are know to work with the Thinkpad 701 line. I was planning on using MS-DOS 6.22 w/ Windows 3.11 for Workgroups on it, so if your drives can work with that, I'll love to know.

I'll appreciate the help if you guys can list those out, or better yet, sell me one.

- Bovine Mage

I don't remember the exact model because I sold my 701 but I had a "Port 24x" pcmcia CDROM. It isn't bootable on the 701 and I don't know if any of them will be. It came with a driver disk for DOS and I was able to load Windows 98 and Linux on my 701 using this CDROM. I also bought a cheap PCMCIA CDROM off eBay it didn't come with any drivers but the port drivers made it work. I used Slackware linux and it has a boot disk that loads the PCMCIA drivers and then you can use the CDROM to load the rest of the system. Just to recap the brand name of the CDROM was "Port".

I found this:

Exp Computer Inc. PCMCIA Portable Quad Speed CD-ROM Kit (Model CD-421)

And just got it from Ebay, install the drivers from their website (which is surprisingly still up, considering how old their company and products are), and installed them for DOS/Win 3.1. It didn't work at first (Something about not having enough "4k memory," or some such), after rebooting a few times, it started reading CDs just fine.

Sweet.

- Bovine Mage