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Using CompactFlash on Compaq LTE 5400

Terrum

New Member
Joined
Mar 17, 2015
Messages
8
Location
UK, Kent
I've tried upgrading my Compaq LTE 5400's failed hard-drive with a CF2IDE converter. I started off with a simple cheap, Chinese CF card: https://www.ebay.com/itm/302882775956 (8GB)

The laptop detected its capacity and, seems to 'boot' just fine, as the BIOS can detect the drive and can happily show a 'no boot partition found' error, which means it can surely understand and read the drive (could be wrong about this however).

I got my MS-DOS 6.22 floppy disks and it got as far as configuring the disk. After selecting to configure the disk, it would reboot, and it would hang on 'Starting MS-DOS...' The floppy drive would still be activated and audibly moving, however the whole laptop seems to have ceased as the caps lock key doesn't light up when pressing it, and clearly the floppy drive is still running because the whole thing has frozen.

So I thought my next diagnostics step would be to get a proper CF card. Using this link as a reference http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/CompactFlash_boot_drive I decided to get a Transcend 266X because 'These cards are known to identify themselves as fixed disk via CF-IDE adapters without any manual intervention'.

Got my 8GB Transcend 266X today - exactly the same issue. Just seems to hang on 'Starting MS-DOS...' after the laptop reboots from selecting 'configure hard-disks'.

I'm hoping someone can offer some advice or shed some light on this matter as it seems impossible to diagnose at this stage. I could get another CF2IDE adapter incase the one I have is faulty, but I'd like to know what others can suggest before I do this. Thanks so much for reading and any responses are greatly appreciated!
 
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