#thinkpad760cd — Public Fediverse posts

I finally got a #CompactFlash to #IDE adapter working in my gorgeous and rugged #IBM #Thinkpad760CD from 1996! The IDE disk continues to work beautifully, but using CF gives me more options to quickly switch operating systems.

I'd ddrescued the IDE disk at various points along the way as I experimented with #MSDOS622, #Windows98 and finally most recently and most successfully, #WindowsNT4.

I wrote those images to CF cards but bloody hell I dunno how many times I faced the dreaded error 174 early in POST (which indicates "no hard disk detected") while trying out different Compact Flash cards and adapters.

I finally hit on the right combination today, quite by accident, as I probably moved a jumper on one of the adapters that had failed for me before. This after very close reading of the Thinkpad Legacy Hardware forum on https://forum.thinkpads.com/

This CF card is a little bit faster than the original disk; I'd just picked the first 2GB one I found in my collection. I have benchmarked all of them so the next OS will go on the fastest one I can find. Probably an ancient Linux or IBM OS/2 Warp 4.

It's hard to describe the satisfaction of getting old kit like this working again! #retrocomputing

A couple of screenshots made on my #IBM #Thinkpad760CD, one contrasting the #WindowsNT4 system properties dialog with the output of neofetch from my daily-driver desktop that's already a few years old (running in the latest puTTY, built for ancient 32-bit Windows); the other screenshot shows a Wikipedia page rendered perfectly in #InternetExplorer2, thanks to wrp, the Web Rendering Proxy. (The latter has its limitations; it's not possible to enter text, or download files. It's perfect for navigating and reading, though, and quick enough. The server running wrp is a tiny HP machine from 2011!)

#retrocomputing #vintageComputing #

I've not been having much success with CF to IDE adapters in my gorgeous #IBM #Thinkpad760CD, so I'm hoping this #mSATA to #IDE adapter will do the job. Though it seems to be impossible to find mSATA SSDs in sizes smaller than 64GB.

#CompactFlash #IntegratedDriveElectronics

Simple things make me happy.

#RetroComputing #WindowsNT4 #FloppyDisks #IBM #Thinkpad #Thinkpad760CD

@millihertz thanks! Neither of them are #CardBus, for sure. CardBus cards have the gold strip with the studs. Definitely doesn't fit either - I tried. 🙄

The machine is an #IBM #Thinkpad760CD built in 1996, so ISA era, as you guessed.

Getting the #Windows98 driver for the FEther PCC-TXF #PCMCIA network card installed on my 1996 #Thinkpad760CD and then configuring TCP/IP networking reminded me what an appalling, barely-working mess Windows was at the time when this hardware was new.

The OS hangs if the card is inserted before the driver is installed. Through repeated experimentation, I found a system state during probing for #PlugNPlay hardware when the OS would get most of the way through driver installation. After several attempts and many reboots, I was in a position to attempt to configure TCP/IP.

Turns out for DHCP and DNS to work, you need to give the machine a name and manually configure the DNS server and default route IP addresses.

What I found astonishing was the lack of feedback in any of this; no log files to inspect, no graphical tooling to renew an IP address. Just lots of poking in the dark and endless reboots.

#RetroComputing #Windows98 #InternetExplorer5 #IBM #Thinkpad #Thinkpad760CD #PCMCIA