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Hey everyone, it's Colin! How's it going?
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I recently picked up this old ThinkPad. Let's see what it takes to get it up and running again.
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[♪ Music - Intro ♪]
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This is an IBM ThinkPad 390E from 1999
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and it was a pretty mainstream kinda laptop during its day.
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There were a few different configurations you could get on this particular model.
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This is a low-end one. It comes with a 12 inch LCD, but it could also be had in a 13 and 14 inch version,
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which also got you a little bit better resolution.
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This one has a 300 megahertz Celeron CPU, but the higher-end models came with up to a 333 megahertz mobile Pentium 2.
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Base RAM on these was 32 megabytes. Some of the higher end ones came with 64.
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And you could get these with up to a 6.4 gig hard drive.
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Obviously, this is an older type of machine before IBM started doing the touchpads in the palm rest,
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so all you got was the little TrackPoint nubbin thing here on the keyboard.
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But what's particularly interesting about this machine is its bay configuration.
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Obviously, this particular computer has been used for quite a while.
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I actually picked it up off of the e-waste pile, so I saved it from getting recycled.
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It's overall in really good condition.
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Surprisingly enough, it had the power supply with it, which doesn't always happen when you're grabbing stuff off of recycle piles.
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But it's just got a few, you know, kinda basic scratches and some label residue and stuff like that...
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from use, but it's overall in really good shape.
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On the bottom is kinda typical IBM construction,
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so there's these connectors here for plugging it into a docking station.
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Here's the cover for, I believe, the RAM.
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The battery comes out just by pushing this tab and sliding it forward,
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and surprisingly enough, this battery still works. I'm- I'm quite surprised by that,
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I left the machine plugged in for a while and it actually powered on...
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um, with the battery in there and the AC adapter unplugged.
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But this flex bay is really kinda curious.
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So it's the same type of latching design...
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and then, this entire bay that has the floppy drive and CD-ROM can come out.
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This is a 24x CD-ROM, but you could get different modules that would go into this bay on the side.
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And...
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You can see, if I flip this thing up...
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There's this flappy door, so you can stick a wide variety of things, not just different kinds of like floppy or CD drives.
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But this thing was compatible with another battery.
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Um, I've read that they also made additional hard drive carriers that you could stick in here.
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And then things like Zip Drives and LS120 and all the- the supposed successor to the floppy that never really took off.
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Also, one curious little note from back in the day when laptops were being made,
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like, you know, these bigger style, this has got feet. *Chuckle*
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Fold out, fold out little plastic feet. Been a long time since I've seen laptops with feet on 'em.
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On this side, pretty typical layout. There's a built-in 56K modem,
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sound, in and out with an actual like, analog volume dial. It's been a long time since we've seen that too.
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Couple of PCMCIA card slots.
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This one came with, I believe, this was an Ethernet, yeah. A 10/100 Ethernet card.
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I do have the dongle for that, I think, somewhere? I'll have to look for it.
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Around back, pretty straightforward compliment of ports.
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Uh, this is, I believe, PS/2, serial, VGA, your standard parallel port, AC adapter in...
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And then on this side: USB, the door is missing, so I'm not sure if this is S-Video or PS/2.
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Actually, that I believe is S-Video out for hooking up to like an old TV to present or whatever.
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Infrared for syncing with things like Palm Pilots, and then your power switch.
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Nothing around front except for a couple of latches.
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It's also been a long time since we've had laptops with latches to hold the screen closed.
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When I first got this machine and powered it on,
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I figured the hard drive was just blank.
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Which is a good thing, right? If you're gonna send a machine out to get recycled, you wanna wipe the hard drive on it.
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But, you know, I'd go into the- into the BIOS on here and I'd wanna look at the system specs.
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And like I said, you know, I know that this thing has the 300 megahertz Celeron
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because its got the sticker on the corner here and it actually says so, I believe, during- during boot.
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And obviously, it's got the 12 inch display.
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And here's, you know, the CPU and the speed.
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One thing that's really kind of frustrating about this machine is it doesn't list anything about its internal hard drive capabilities.
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Um, it'll tell you how much memory is in here.
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And this one has actually received a memory upgrade. It's got 160 meg in it, which is totally awesome!
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But nowhere in here do they talk about like... anything to do with the hard drive. So... okay, fine.
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I guess IBM figured, you know, "There's only one hard drive bay, so...
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What would there be for you to configure regarding the hard drive in this thing?"
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Something curious also is this is from the day before operation systems had, you know, really decent support for laptops.
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I believe this machine typically shipped with Windows 98. So all of your power saving features are actually in the BIOS here.
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Um, settings for, you know, how long the machine goes before it turns off the screen or spins down the hard drive
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or, you know, goes into sleep mode or whatever. Um, you actually set all those things in the BIOS...
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instead of in the OS, which is very interesting.
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So when I first powered this machine on, after going through the BIOS and not seeing any settings about the hard drive in there,
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any ideas as to what its capacity was, I figure, "Okay, I'm just gonna let the machine finish booting...
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You know, maybe- maybe it'll tell me somewhere in there. Maybe there will actually be an OS on this hard drive, who knows?"
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So, I let the machine sit and basically, it never boots.
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Uh, it just sits here at this blinking screen and then goes to "Operating System not found,"
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so I figure, "Oh- Okay. They wiped the hard drive. If I wanna figure out what its specs are, its capacity, all that, I need to pull it out."
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Now, the hard drive bay on this machine is actually quite serviceable, which is rather surprising.
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It's this little door here in the back.
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(And of course, I've got it loosened to make life a little bit easier for us here.)
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And then this door comes off and then your hard drive goes *in there*!
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But, when I took the door off, I saw...
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that, which is...
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so unfortunately, they had taken the hard drive out before putting the machine on the recycle pile.
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The bummer though is you can't just stick any normal IDE laptop hard drive in here as-is.
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This is a very specific size bay, there's no way to screw the drive in.
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There's no holes in the bottom to screw the drive in or anything.
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And... it's tough to see in there, but it's also not a standard connector on the inside.
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So in order to get a hard drive working in that bay, first thing I needed to buy was this little adapter
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and it basically takes you from the standard IDE pin arrangement
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to this kind of edge connector/proprietary thing that IBM was doing. And this was easy enough to find.
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It was all about I think, $4 shipped off of eBay, from somewhere here in the US.
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But then, I got to thinking...
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"You know, what kind of hard drive do I even wanna put in this thing? It doesn't even have anything in it now, so I can kinda blank slate this a little bit.
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Do I wanna put in a really big hard drive in there? Maybe I can stick a whole bunch of games or multiboot different OSes or something like that?"
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But then I got to thinking, "You know, do I really wanna stick a mechanical hard drive in this thing?"
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So that, you know, the lack of having a spare part...
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and my general reluctance to want to put another mechanical drive in this thing that ultimately, is gonna fail.
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And I should note that I'm not necessarily like a purist when it comes to getting this machine back to its like original specifications.
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I'm not trying to restore this thing back to factory condition or anything, I just wanna get it up and running again.
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So that all kinda combined to lead me to go pick up one of these, and this is a CompactFlash card.
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What's interesting about CompactFlash is that it's actually based on the same kind of set of protocols as IDE hard drives.
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There are a few differences here and there... and, you know, it-
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Obviously, there's major differences in capacities, like this is an 8 gig card and it's only like this big.
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But, in general, these are compatible with computers that are just looking for a regular IDE hard drive.
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And apparently, a lot of people will do this kind of conversion
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where they'll get rid of a mechanical drive and swap it out for a CompactFlash card,
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cause obviously this is solid state. It's gonna be way more reliable in the long term.
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And if you can read the label on this card, it says "Mettler-Toledo" on there.
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And, I don't know what specific product came out of, but I know that company makes things like industrial and commercial scales.
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Basically, embedded kind of computing devices, so...
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If they went and put a CompactFlash card in an embedded computing device,
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obviously I'm on the right track because they know that doing this works.
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So I picked up a lot of these cards. I think I got 3 or 4 of 'em.
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These were not brand new, but I think I paid maybe $25-35 shipped for that entire lot of cards.
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Which I think is a decent deal and 8 gig of space is still gonna be plenty for a machine like this.
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Now in order to get that card to work in the computer, I need one more piece and that is... this.
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This is a CompactFlash to IDE adapter.
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And these are surprisingly inexpensive mostly because they appear to be really simple.
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Uh, this one cost me, I think, $3 shipped from China.
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Obviously it took forever to get here, but... you know what, it looks like a really simple device.
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I'm not seeing any sort of like active electronics on it or anything.
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Um, it just- you know, you just stick the card in *here*...
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And then you plug the other end into, you know, your IDE cable or directly into your laptop or... into an adapter deal like this.
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And then it should just work. Um, there are... some jumper settings here that you can use and...
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Just looking at it... they're saying jumper 1-2 is Master/Slave and then jumper 2-3 is Slave/Master.
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Why are they having the second word on there? Slave and... Master.
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I would think that it would just be like jumper 1-2 is "Set this as master," jumper 2-3 is "Set this as slave."
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Solder... pads, this...
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Those are the same...
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Oh! Ohhhh, interesting!
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So this company- This is very crafty. Okay, so here's what's going on:
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This board- this PCB can actually get used for multiple products.
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So this is obviously a single card board, right?
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You just stick- you can only stick one CompactFlash in here and it'll just present as one drive to your computer.
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But if you look at the back, they've got the same solder pads here in these four corners as for this connector.
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I suspect they sell another version of this adapter with a second CompactFlash card reader on the back.
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So you could have two drives.
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So you could have like, you know, effectively, a C: drive on one card and a D: drive on the other as separate hard drives.
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And then this jumper basically flips as to which card is identified as Master and which one is identified as Slave.
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That's really crafty! Okay!
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So anyway, the idea is you know, I'm gonna drop the card into the adapter here,
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and then I stick this guy on the end, and then... that's it!
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Looking at that bay in the back of the computer, I can't necessarily just throw this in as is
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because that's a pretty big hard drive bay. Obviously it's designed for a full 2½ inch drive and this is a lot smaller.
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I'm afraid this thing's gonna be kinda flappin' around back there and it may fall out.
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I don't suspect this edge connector holds on very tightly.
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So I picked up one more thing and this was actually quite a bit harder to find.
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This is the metal cage that the original hard drive would go into.
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This particular model of laptop seems really kinda standard, you know, it seems like a really typical kind of mainstream model, but...
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It's really hard to find parts for this online!
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It took me a while, I finally found a seller that had this cage on it, you know, in stock and available.
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And, it was from a seller in Germany, so I guess hello to all of my German viewers.
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Um, some e-recycling, you know, e-waste kinda shop.
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It cost me $20 shipped from there, so not terribly expensive.
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But it was the only one that I could find. I couldn't find anybody in the US selling this drive cage.
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And maybe this cage is swappable between multiple ThinkPad models.
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I dunno, I couldn't find any information about it, but...
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Anyway, this is the last thing that I think I'll need in order to get this all working.
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Now... something I'll have to figure out is how do I get that to stay in there...
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You know, like, cause otherwise it's just gonna rattle around and stuff. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
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First things first, I wanna make sure that this works in the laptop
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before I commit to figuring out how to adhere all of this down. Because, who knows?
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Maybe they're doing something weird and this whole setup won't work, and I'll have to... you know, switch back to using a regular mechanical drive.
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I took a piece of capped-on tape, stuck it to the back, and then... made like a little pull tab out of it.
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Right, so this is all taped together. It won't fall apart on me.
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But now I can pull it out of the back of the computer,
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you know, without needing to stick it in that cage.
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I'm not sure if you're gonna be able to see this, and we'll see how well I can do this...
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Yeah, see, it maybe- Okay, so I can feel it. It's in the edge connector, but it's in there really loose...
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And... not sure if you can tell... it's really dark. But it's kind of... it's really loose in there.
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Doesn't wanna stay put, so I definitely need to figure out a better permanent solution,
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but for testing and getting this thing up and running, it should work just fine.
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Alright, so let's plug in power here.
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And just for grins, let's try turning it on.
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Alright, uh, that's kind of what I was expecting, so operating system not found.
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Let's try getting a boot CD in here and see we can maybe get a copy of Windows installed or something.
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Okay, attempt number 2, I've got a Windows install disc in there.
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*BEEP*
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Let's see...
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Yeah, I wanna boot from CD-ROM.
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Uh... Let's just start Windows setup from CD-ROM, why not?
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Let's see if the thing's formatted and just...
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maybe doesn't have an operating system on it.
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Not install- Does not have an hard disk. Your hard disk is not- Okay.
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So the hard drive is... probably completely unformatted, so let's quit setup.
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Uh...
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Is fdisk on here?
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"No fixed disks present."
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Okay.
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I'ma have to do a little bit of research.
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Okay, so I did some digging. Here's what I was able to find out.
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Yes, CompactFlash cards work great as boot disks for laptops, you know, anything that needs IDE...
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Except, and now, my memory is being jostled after seeing this message about no fixed disks present,
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the keyword "fixed" is what got me thinking.
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CompactFlash cards can have two modes:
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They can have what they call "Removable Mode" and then "Fixed Mode."
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It's largely just a function of the way the firmware on the card has been set up.
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Removable mode, obviously, is for if you wanna use this in something like a digital camera or, you know, whatever,
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where you're gonna be frequently plugging in the card and removing it.
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And... especially if you wanna be able to hotplug the card into something like a card reader on a PC,
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so that you can, you know, maybe pick pictures up off of it, whatever.
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And I remember doing that a lot when I would have digital cameras that would use this format.
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Apparently, most CompactFlash cards ship in "Removable Mode".
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But... Windows in particular and some other operating systems actually need
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any drive that they can install to to identify as a fixed disk.
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Which has a slightly different set of commands or something like that, I guess?
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It basically makes it behave more like a traditional hard drive instead of, you know, removable media.
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Now, in doing a little bit of digging, I'm lucky in that I bought a SanDisk card,
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because at one point, SanDisk offered a utility that you could,
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you know, boot off of and run to convert between the two modes.
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Now, if you go to SanDisk's website today, they've got a knowledge base article that talks about this,
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but they then go on to say that they no longer sell CompactFlash cards that are set as fixed from the factory,
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and they also no longer offer a utility that lets you flip back and forth between the two modes on the cards.
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And, one other little note is... I read some reports from people who have gone down this rabbit hole,
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and found that not all of the SanDisk cards are compatible with the utility.
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So SanDisk doesn't have that utility available anymore,
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but I was able to *Cough* find it on the Internet, so...
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Lemme get a boot disk going and we'll stick the card in there and see what we can do to get it converted.
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Oh, I gotta say, when this thing's first booting up, like with the fan going on the side and the CD-ROM drive spinning up,
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this computer is like, really really noisy.
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Okay! Um, well yeah, I wanna boot to DOS, so I guess I can choose DOS.