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Is there a 'on-board' Hard drive?

You could get a hard-card - it's a card containing a hard drive that plugs in a free slot. I have one in my 5150 - so you can keep the two floppy drives and 63.5W PSU :)
 
I bought a Flash drive on eBay once -- 2Mb of Flash on an 8-bit ISA card. It's currently sitting in a Compaq portable. Sadly, its BIOS doesn't support INT 19 so the Compaq won't boot from it (though if you boot from a floppy it shows up as drive C: just fine). I keep meaning to get round to burning a modified BIOS ROM for the host PC to get round that.

A card which supported removable media (eg, CompactFlash or MMC) would obviously be nicer, but I'm not aware of any such at the moment.
 
If you can obtain an IDE interface even for old IBM PCs, you can always connect an IDE to CF adapter and use a Compact Flash card instead of a hard drive.
 
JohnElliott said:
I bought a Flash drive on eBay once -- 2Mb of Flash on an 8-bit ISA card. It's currently sitting in a Compaq portable. Sadly, its BIOS doesn't support INT 19 so the Compaq won't boot from it (though if you boot from a floppy it shows up as drive C: just fine). I keep meaning to get round to burning a modified BIOS ROM for the host PC to get round that.
Click to expand...

I have now done this (for good measure, I also burned a new font ROM for the CGA card, with the IBM 3270PC font; it looks very pretty on the Portable's builtin monitor). The changes I made to the Portable's BIOS can be found at the bottom of my page on the Portable and Deskpro -- download CPQPATCH, and the C source contains the assembly source for the patch.The patch should also allow a Portable to boot from a Future Domain TMC-850 with the 8.4 or 8.5 firmware, but I haven't checked that. Note that it only works on Portables with BIOS revision C, because that's the only revision I've got.
 
carlsson said:
If you can obtain an IDE interface even for old IBM PCs, you can always connect an IDE to CF adapter and use a Compact Flash card instead of a hard drive.
Click to expand...

An IDE->SCI bridge could be a solution to this problem. They can be found on eBay for about $30 a piece, but at the moment I can only find US sellers, which would add pretty steep shipping costs for buyers in Europe and elsewhere.

But it can be done. As a matter of fact, I recently browsed through a few sites that described such a set-up (a Compactflash card connected to an IDE->SCSI bridge, which in turn is connected to the SCSI controller an old Macintosh computer).

Robust, easy on the PSU, reliable, and completely silent. :)
 
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