Thanks to the great number of very useful posts in this thread the difference between CF card IDE adapter and the PCMCIA slots has been well clarified indeed. (Well, at least for me as a non-techie who Boolean-naively had concluded simply that one cannot access a PCMCIA defined slot/device whithout some least operating system part working already; what Albert now more correctly defined as the chicken-and-egg problem).
Now I regret to have done a wrong "investment" two years ago with a backpack (parallel port connected) CF card reader - far too expensive, relatively, and I even had to search far and wide for one; then. (I just didn't know about the IDE-related internals of those cards, and of the sheer existence of pertinent adapters.) Nevertheless, I'd like to muse a bit more on this PCMCIA catch-22 especially with laptops(*). Nosing around at some of the URLs for instance showed up one IDE adapter with a 8(!) MB card holding a scaled-down Linux (tapr.org) - that one would hardly hold the linux card service too but a larger one (in the 128 or 256 MB range) probably could; and with DOS, 8 MB wouldn't be of a problem anyway. With the two PCMCIA slots, which most of those not-quite-so-old (survPC-)laptops have, this could allow for reasonable workspace already. (Lots of ensuing questions here, especially regarding how/where to have the screen drivers and such; and especially these laptop screens and video cards/chips have their whims, firmware or not.) All this would be "work-around" but easy to go such (and comparably cheap). // Heimo Claasen // <hammer at revobild dot net> // Brussels 2002-08-08 The WebPlace of ReRead - and much to read ==> http://www.revobild.net (*) Bob's hint to the "small form factor" adapters helps indeed to think of the alternative for a died laptop HD - these are, and still remain so expensive that at least the smaller capacity CF mem cards could offer a viable alternative to keep the laptop working. And there are 2GB CF cards already, (_cards_, not the IBM-Microdrives; San Disk shows some) - sure definitely too expensive (yet. But.) To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
