Hi,
Machine works fine with 810Mb drive, and I've a couple of spare caddies.
Using 16 gig KingSpec SSD in spare caddy, fdisk reports 117mb, but when setting partition, nothing is written.
I read elsewhere on this site that for large drives the cable select pin, bottom right needs to be isolated.
Looking at the 29H9422 flexible ide cable, top right pin is 1, bottom right is two, next top is then 3 and next bottom 4. I'll try and show rear view of drive connector.
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x 3 1
x x x x x x x x x x x x ≡ x x x x x x x x x 4 2

On the ribbon, pins 3 and 4 have their own tracks off to the mobo. pins 1,2,4 are linked.
So, I cut the track between pin 1 and 2 and also between 2 and 4, so that pin 2 is isolated.

I now get error 174 booting!

I see from the SSD data sheet that the 4 pins configuration is.
Pins 1 to 2 jumpered, Master
Pins 2 to 4 jumpered, Slave
No pins connected, Cable Select

I read somewhere else that you need to connect pins 27 to 59 and 53 and 60, but with only 48 pins in the connector, I don't follow it.

I do realise that the 760L will only be able to register 7.9 gig, but would be happy with that, if I can get the thing to properly register.

Could someone who has done the caddy mod advise me please on how to get this to work correctly.

Thanks

[mod edit: I've inserted a pic warning in the topic, per ozzymud's suggestion]

I don't cut the ribbon, I simply bend pin 2 on the drive (drives easier to replace then cables with CF cards).

Also there are 2 different caddy designs (counting the ?aftermarket? one)... one way older, this one doesn't like bigger drives at all from my experience, and the newer design that works with big drives.

2.1GB + caddy: 82H5536 <-- need this one for large HD (10GB with linux boot under 8GB, in linux can use all 10GB )


1.4GB and lower caddy: 29H9422 <--- issues with drives over 4GB, bend pin 2 on drive


There is also a 3rd one, from eBay, aftermarket?? I just got it and haven't yet tested with large drives (assuming though it is the newer design)



I mainly only have 29H9422 models, they work fine with drives upto 4GB (been using CF cards in a CF2IDE adaptor), I cannot make it boot with an 8GB CF card without bending pin 2. The one 82H5536 I have worked with a 10GB drive without mod or using the CF2IDE and an 8GB CF card (the adapter has a master/slave jumper on it is why)

Hope it helps

P.S. might wanna add *IMG* to your subject, as i added pics although they are tiny, and change 760L to 760 series

EDIT: Oh, make sure you have the latest BIOS too... v1.30
http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/downloa ... MIGR-59734
look for hvet47ww

Ossymud,

You are my hero, well at this moment...!

If you just bent the pin, and I have cut the track in two places, then I can recover the situation by relinking 1 and 4 with a wire as I don't want to make the drive non standard yet.

I think that that will restore the status quo electrically.

Cannot try this out till later tonight.

I have the V1.3 BIOS but not come across the CF to IDE adaptors. Sounds interesting

Thanks for the advice

$2.33US on dealextreme.com, I ordered one figuring $2 wouldn't be a big waste, coupled it with a Transcend 133x 4GB card I had laying around, and it worked...

CompactFlash CF Card to IDE Hard Disk Adapter Card (IDE-44)

I've since ordered/received 10 more "just to have around"

Now I have several in 760's with varying sizes of CF cards, and even tried one in an older HP laptop (AMD 1.6GHz single core)... used a 233X and it is surprisingly fast, def not a true SSD, but battery life is amazing, and the kids can bump it all they want Just got a spare caddy for my 701C butterfly thinkpad, just ain't got around to putting a poor man's SSD in it yet

Ozzymud,
Well I tried restoring the missing link between 4 and 1, so my caddy is wired as if I'd just bent the pin 2 over, and I still get the 174 error.

The remarkable Rick Ekblaw has advised me that the SSD might not be best on a DOS/W98 machine because of the repeated read write to same sectors and so I'm going to get a couple of ide/cf converters and try again.

Thanks

On that,



quoted from:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9123140/Which_operating_system_is_best_for_solid_state_drives_

But, if i understand correctly... CF cards include error checking and correcting (ECC) and wear leveling circuitry that is transparent to the OS installed.

So if my CF only lasts for 1 year... oh well... $9 a year is good enough (I figure on these old systems... should last much longer seeings how often they are actually played with). I haven't had one wear out yet, been playing with them for about 6 months now.

The wear leveling reliability has varied greatly over the product lines of SSD drives over the years. I would think the different operating systems behave differently in read/writes on the OS drive (newer OS might work better for SSD then older ones that were designed before SSD was common).

What I want to know is why SSD on such and old machine, it can't be speed since any IDE drive made a few years after the 760 was discontinued will probably saturate the IDE controller. Those laptops didn't use up that much power so how much battery life will a SSD save? If you are doing it just to do it then that is fine, seems like people love using old CF/SSD drives on machines much older then a 760 Thinkpad (Apple IIgs for one).

Fair question,
I use the machine to download data off a two different quite old loggers.
Software for one is DOS and serial link will not work on NT onwards, but will on W98.
Second one is ok for W98 but uses netbeui not TCP/IP, and I've failed to make this work on XP etc.
In fact I use MasterBoot, dual boot that defaults into DOS as it boots in a few seconds.
Then less frequently I use W98 for the other logger and to offload files etc.
The machine battles on, and was getting concerned that if the drive did fail, then I'd be in a bad place plus the fact that W98 takes a while to get running and I thought that perhaps the boot time with an SSD might be faster, and if fast enough could do away with dual boot.

I do have a newer machine with a serial port and ethernet and that is the master backup plan, but I guess mainly entertaining myself getting my brain around changing technology.
Guilty as charged.

I'm following this thread with interest since I'd also like to upgrade my 760XD with an CF card in the "near" future.
Some machines will have restrictions regarding hard drives. My understanding is that my 760XD will accept drives up to 8GB only. As these old models will be difficult to get (at least in good working condition), I think a CF card+Adapter is a very good and affordable option.

@Tasurinchi: You got it, that is my main reason for the CF cards... old 2.5" 17mm SMALL hard disks are getting pretty tough to find these days... plus to be cost effective they need to cost under $16.31 shipped... i.e. the cost of a 4GB CF + CF2IDE adapter.

10.99 + $2.99 S/H: Newegg: Transcend 4GB Compact Flash (CF) Flash Card Model TS4GCF133

$2.33+$0 S/H: dealextreme.com: CompactFlash CF Card to IDE Hard Disk Adapter Card (IDE-44) (I bought 10 the 2nd time... $1.61 each shipped)

Take a look at this eBay search for 17mm hard drive ... $25 shipped is the cheapest... granted you CAN find em cheaper, but I don't have to hunt/wait for a 4GB CF to arrive or hunt it down.

Past price, the battery lasts a lot longer when it doesn't have to keep a spindle powered.

Also, attaching the CF "hard drive" to my modern desktop is as simple as sliding the CF into my internal card reader. Nice to be able to "dd" drive images back and forth or to transfer files.

If you don't have a caddy, there are empty aftermarket caddies for $7 on eBay as well, even with the cost of that (for the connector), it is still $1 cheaper then getting a used hard disk

I have used several CF drives (8 MB to 8 GB) on my desktop computer with the 40 pin IDE with no problem. I have partitioned & formatted some of the 8 GB CFs with no problem but when I try using them on the TP760 which has a 60 pin connector on the computer connecting through a flexible circuit to a 50 pin connector which mates with the drive, there are some problems. All my IDE to CF adapters have a slave/master jumper and for the 2.5" drives, they have 44 pins so don't use pins 1-6 of the 50 pin connector. Judging by the hard drives I have with a 50 pin connector, the first 4 pins are used for master/slave/cable select and bending pin 2 on a drive that uses it would force master. The 82H5536 flexible circuit has both connectors on the same side and works in the thick (old) caddy that will take a 16.5 mm thick drive. This is the one used in the following description: With a 2 GB SanDisk Ultra II with original formatting (card came with what looks like system files that I dare not tamper with) this has worked trouble free for several years. Now trying 2 8GB CFs, I have a consistent problem. With a possible BIOS limitation in mind, I used FDISK to make a 1000 MB primary DOS partition and a 2 GB extended DOS partition with a drive filling it. The first was formated FAT16 and the second FAT32. Trying to load DOS from the windows 98 startup floppy, it starts to load but hangs with the floppy spinning. Same for loading DOS 5.0. When I try the stand alone diagnostic program Tuff Test Pro, I can read and write anywhere on the CF card and the floppy error free. I do not see why unpartitioned space on the CF would cause trouble with the BIOS. I tried to load DOS with another 8 GB CF with original formatting installed and had the same result. Any clues as to the problem?

As to the PN 001-30003, this has connectors on opposite sides of the flex circuit and works with the thin drives in a 12 mm caddy. I bought one from ajo09 on ebay but did not test it till the time for guaranteed return expired. It had open runs. When it did not work I started comparing it to the 82H5536 and stopped after checking 5 pins with 2 opens though I could see the trace on the flexible circuit. ajo09 seems to be a sizable company that does not know what they are selling (so this may or may not be a common problem) and won't do anything to correct a problem after 30 days.

Here is a screenshot of my 760XD with an 8GB WinTec 233X CF card... warning 2.56MB image straight from camera..

http://conradshome.com/thinkpad/760xd/images/8gb_cf_ssd.jpg

#1, sorry for the shakiness... can't seem to hold the camera still enough.

#2, notice, C: (961MB), D: (961MB), Linux ext2 (4788MB), Linux Swap (677MB) = 7347MB (i.e 8GB card)

I install Linux 1st, partition manually... create the 2 dos partitions and the 3rd Linux one (under 8GB, no issue here on 8GB CF card )

Then, once grub is all set up and you can boot Linux, boot from floppy to Free-DOS, sys c:, copy stuff to c:\dos

add the Free-DOS partition to grub's "menu.lst"...



Enjoy... If it don't work for you, could be the CF card(UDMA modes and all that), the CF2IDE adapter(how it reports the CF card to the system), or ??? dunno... works here.

I wonder if there is a firmware difference of significance between the XD and ED. I see from your screen shot that the CF is configured with 256 heads. In the 2GB CF that works with the EL & ED, the drive reports 64 heads but for the 8 GB CF it reports 256 heads and the TP firmware does not give me the option of changing it. In my desktop computer I can choose 256, 128 or 16 heads with the cylinder count adjusted accordingly. If the process of loading DOS includes checking the HD resources and it can't deal with 256 heads, it might hang. In that case a stand alone utility might reconfigure the HD to something the BIOS could accept. I have no idea if this idea has merit but it is all I can think of. Tuff Test's ability to use the disks is proof that this is not a hardware issue. I will see if I can find such a utility.

Another thing you can do is use SysLinux to "boot" DOS...

from Linux, install syslinux, copy memdisk from the usr/lib/syslinux directory to /boot. Then make/get a bootable floppy image, place it in /boot as well. Then add an entry to grub's menu.lst:

title Boot Floppy Image
root (hd0,2) <--- whatever partition /boot is in, assuming the 3rd here "2",(0) C: (1)D: (2)linux
kernel /boot/memdisk
initrd /boot/bootdisk.ima

This will give you a permanent emulated floppy on A:, B: will be actual hardware if installed. You would need to edit the floppy from linux... "mount -o loop /boot/bootdisk.ima /floppy1" if you needed to alter config.sys/autoexec.bat. autoexec on the floppy image could contain 2 lines...

c:
c:\autoexec

That way you would only need to edit the config.sys in Linux. This would work for sure in DOS or Windows 3.1, ain't tried in Win9x or up. I only use FreeDOS on my machine with 8GB for the PS2.exe, some dos games, and Win3.1.

Give that a go, has worked in other machines for me in the past, apparently the memdisk boot does it's own translation of the drives it finds, allows FreeDOS to see em just fine.

EDIT: Keep in mind, I can ONLY get FreeDOS, Windows 3.1, and Linux working on these machines with over 4GB CF cards. MS-DOS, Windows 9X, anything else has the boot hangs described by others. Linux and FreeDOS seem to be able to handle drive translation flawlessly. Other OS's, not so much. Hardware wise, 8GB+ drives work in the 760 series, the OS is what gives issues.

Ok, so after a bit of a pause. my cf-ide2.5" 44 adapters arrived.
But, there is no missing pin to match the blank key socket on the 29H9422 ide socket.

http://www.buyincoins.com/details/dual-cf-to-44-pin-ide-male-hard-drive-adapter-bootable-product-618.html

Is it likely I can make these useful, or would I be better off starting again?

Thanks

Not sure if the dual adapter will work at all, but you can find the "key" pin by counting it off from "pin 1", looking at the bottom picture of your link, it is at the top there, the square pad.

just count from 1(square solder point) to 26... 26 is the key, fold it back or snap it off...


Again though, I've only used the $2.33+$0 S/H: dealextreme.com one: CompactFlash CF Card to IDE Hard Disk Adapter Card (IDE-44)... and it is a single adapter, would love to know if the duals work, but I highly doubt it.

ossymud, it would have helped a lot if I'd sent the correct link as the units I have is single not dual...sorry.

http://www.buyincoins.com/details/cf-to-44-pin-ide-male-hard-drive-adapter-bootable-01-product-617.html

However, you have Identified the square pad I hadn't seen, which is the significant bit.

My guess had trimmed off 25...good thing I bought 5 of the things to practice on.

Will try it all out tonight.

Thanks

Well, after all that I've made no progress at all with these CF converters.
With the pin 26 removed, then the ide end will insert into the flex ribbon of and the orientation is such that the select jumper end is at the 1 end of the adapter. Kind of makes sense as thats the same end as the master jumper on the adapter except there are a lot of ide pin sockets at what I'd imagined are at the business end of the connector with no pins in.
As soon as you power on the machine it freezes. Simply goes no way into the boot at all. No messages or even illumination of a single pixel on the screen.
Cannot even get into the F1 set up screen.

Get the same result with 1 gig CF card in or out of the adapter.

Just for fun, I inserted another adapter with pin 25 removed. That fits onto the ribbon entirely the opposite way around and you guessed it, same result.

Pins 1,2,3,4,5, & 6 on the ribbon cable will be unused, there should be a jumper on the CF adapter to do that job, should be set to master.

On mine when the adapters are plugged into the thinkpad, the CF card is plugged in to the underside of the adapter, and the 6 empty pins on the ribbon are to the right... here is an image that shows mine:

http://www.conradshome.com/thinkpad/760_battery/poor_man_ssd_large.jpg

I think we are off track here, gotta remember the CF adapter is actually missing pins 1 thru 6, so pin 1 on the CF adapter is actually pin 7... I laid mine next to the ribbon cable and counted... it would be pin 20 on the CF adapter, which is pin 26 on the ribbon (this is why you should only bend them out of the way for testing, I have one here that I snapped it off before i tested as well )

here is what you should wind up with (click for high res 3MB)...

Yes, its all a bit confusing with these connectors of differing sizes making the numbering schemes not obvious to the likes of me
Thanks very much for the graphic information, I'm looking forward to another attempt later on.
When I work out the right way, I'll add a pic of what it looks like just for the record.

Phew, it works. Thanks OzzyMud.
Pin #20 on the adapter is indeed the one to bend or cut.
Sorry ran out of talent when trying to add the pics of my success.
Anyway, you'll have to trust me that the card in place shot looked a lot like yours.

Tried with the only other cf card which is 16gig, but the boot process hangs at the point the floppy should start to load the command.com.

I had thought that it would load but with truncated size.

Should 8gig be the max?

delete the partitions on the 16GB, then use linux to create them, if there is a dos/win MBR in place, the sys def hangs... then keep in mind about the 3 diff IDE->760 adapters, only one supports >6GB natively.

My 8GB will similarly freeze unless there is a Linux MBR in place, won't even try to boot. Ain't tried a 16CF, but I did have luck with a 10GB normal hard disk at one time, just make sure the main Linux partition falls UNDER the 8GB mark, you can format the rest to mount elsewhere... like /home or /usr

Possibly not completely on topic, but the aim of my quest is to get an image of the mechanical drive onto the solid state card and boot from it.
Winimage 8.1 runs on the W98 that's there and can see a 16gb card in the PCMCIA slot.
So, a bit frustrated that when Winimage creates a .vhd of the drive on the cf card, subsequent opening of that .vhd by Winimage on the 760 machine or another desktop machine, fails with "error reading file"

Actually, could be having a senior moment. I just remembered have a remote CD drive I use with this old machine that I'm not sure I can boot from, but as I think it connects via the PCMCIA slot, perhaps it can be booted from, in which case a Knoppix live CD may be my answer.

Your not going to be booting from a windows 98 partition on anything over a 4GB CF card, 8GB fails (Linux is the only thing that can do the translation), FreeDOS can see it and be started from a grub floppy image.

All that being said, if you have both the external floppy and internal CD, you can boot from the CD using a Smart Boot Manager floppy. Or by installing SBM to an EMPTY 16GB CF attached with an adapter to the IDE port. (hot swapping will not work, but in the case of both internal floppy/cd, this works)

The easiest way to get a hard disk image is with a laptop to usb adapter on a more modern machine. you can use dd for linux to get an IMG file of the entire drive.

dd if=/dev/sdc of=760_disk.img (sdc will be whichever your usb drive is)

Now proud owner of 1,4,8 and 16 gig cards.
New 4 and 8 one state on the outside Fat32... which was a surprise, but I guess shouldn't have been.
Put the 4 gig one in an XP machine to see If I could partition it and make 1st one FAT16.
Cannot repartition but can format. Tried selecting FAT and driving the allocation unit for FAT16, but it still ends up as FAT32.
Booted up Knoppix which is the only Linux thing I can play with and ran qparted.
That reports that the card is actually 8 gig, bit with the 1st bit hidden...?
Qparted will repartition the active bit and can select all manner of files sytems, except FAT16.
Haven't looked at the 8 gig one, but rereading the previous posts maybe I'll have to use that and one of Ozzymud's Linux tricks from Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2011 10:15 pm, but not being Linux competent, and never having played with grub etc, then pretty much out of my depth.
I had thought going for simplicity, that I could get a 2gig FAT16 compatible device and all would be sweet and able to boot into DOS/W98, but I see that Ozzymud plus others has failed with CF's less than 4 gig.
Insufficient research on my part.

No no... 4GB cf and less are fine for dos/win in the 760's. 4 gig cards are what I mainly use.. To be specific Transcend CompactFlash 133x 4GB. I use these for installing windows 9x on all my 760's. I only started playing with the 8GB+ just to see if I could make them boot (which I did ).

Just plug it into the adapter and let dos or windows partition it. Only on the 8GB and bigger do you need to make the partitions in, and install Linux to be able to boot. DOS will partition an 8GB into 4 2GB fat16 partitions... but the 760 will hang on next reboot. For your 8 or 16GB CF cards, DELETE all partitions from the cards, use an external floppy to boot the Debian net install cd (using smart boot manager on the floppy)... do a standard install, creating your DOS and Linux boot partitions UNDER the 8GB boundary, and install grub to (hd0) in the MBR. (only tried with "legacy" 0.97)

Sorry Ozzymud, I missunderstood your statement re 4gig.
Ok, so managed to fdisk my 4gig one in DOS6.2 and it booted. Cool.

Seems though that once formatted in the ide/cf converter, the CF card is now not completely useable using the PCMCIA/CF card adapter that I use in DOS and W98.
In DOS using the PCMCIA device, the FAT is kind of jumbled and writing not a success, but not an really and issue just an observation.
I imagine then that in a USB CF adapter I'll have a similar issue, but with the CF in the IDE, and that then plugged into a USB IDE converter, it'll be fine.

Just need to generate a few free hours to remove the 810 drive from its caddy and image it, and then put that image onto the CF/ide combinatiojn, and if that boots, I'll be happy and impressed.

Thanks

Not sure if I followed all that entirely... but my main 4GB size I use I can install whatever OS I like when plugged into the CF adapter as a hard disk. Then I can either put just the CF card into my desktop machines multi card reader (a cheasy XXX in 1 3.5 inch internal USB based reader) or plug the CF w/adapter into an external 2.5 inch drive to usb adapter and read/write freely.

I also have an "IBM PC Card Adapter for IBM microdrives" p/n: 31L9315 which allows me to transfer data from one CF card in it to another attached to the CF2IDE hard disk internally. (IMG: http://gg104013.dyndns.org/ebay2011/ibm/CIMG7892k.jpg)

Haven't done ANY testing on the 8GB CF card in the PCMCIA microdrive adapter, but using the open source ext2ifs (http://uranus.chrysocome.net/linux/ext2ifs.htm), nice little utility to let you have full read/write access to ext2 Linux file systems under windows.

What I meant was that if my 4meg Kingston or new Transcend card has a restored image on it, it will not boot in the ide adapter, but by booting machine from a floppy, files are visible, but the FAT on the Kingston was a little screwed up.
If I boot the machine on the HDD and look at this card with its restored image in the PCMCIA card slot adapter under DOS or W98, then both OS’s are not happy with the data on the card, although looking at the card on a Linux or XP machine the data looks ok.

I have tried three ways to image the 811 drive, winimage, dd and clonezilla.
Winimage in W98 of the drive with the OS on it maybe a generally bad idea, and anyway, after making it, Winimage on any machine could not open it.
I have some experience cloning a drive between two identical laptops, when the emergency partition on one got trashed, and the gzipped Image I made using dd wouldn’t boot when restored.
However, I did the same using a Clonezilla live cd, and that imaged and restored and booted.
So finally dared to open the caddy with my good and working ok 811 drive and clonezilla’d it to an image, then restored that to both my 4Meg cards…still won’t boot. Tried fdisk /mbr, and that said not enough room..?
Only way I can get the card to boot the machine is if I do the partitioning and formatting locally on the 760.

Actually, its just dawned that perhaps I need to create the image of the drive on 760 machine and restore it via the same ide interface, So off to try an Active@Disk Image. Can run that from floppy and place image on the PCMCIA card. Will report back.

Is this windows 9x?

If so, just (in the thinkpad on the CF card):

boot to a W9x(same ver as is on the HD) startup disk (the ebd one or a custom one with format and fdisk)
fdisk/make active...

FDISK 1/PRI:2048

or

FDISK 1/PRIO:4096

reboot

format C: /s

reboot from CF to ensure it works...

then in Windows XP or whatever...
delete the msdos.sys (or in next step make sure it is overwritten)
make sure your viewing ALL files (hiden/system), copy all files from the IDE to the CF

Bingo.. you got a "clone"

This all assumes a CF card in the IDE slot when formatted in the thinkpad is able to be read in another machine. (could be some issue with the CF2IDE or the TP adaptor)