Annoyingrob
09-28-01, 04:20 PM
A little background first: I have an ancient 486/50 laptop, 12Meg (I think, maybe 24) ram, Upgraded to a 1gig hard drive. Unfortunately it has a broken keyboard, and a dead recharge circuit (A laptop tethered by a power cord, kind of defeats the purpose).
I had this sudden urge to fix the laptop the other day, as it has a perfectly good 1 Gig hd, and a 100Mbit nic. I found out what was wron with the keyboard, but kind of broke it a little more when fixing it. Throwing it across the room, shouting curse words, I wondered if the Mouse port would function as a keyboard port. Surprise, it did. I was happy, I had a working, uhh...Tethered laptop. I installed Dos, and finally got the Xircom drivers to find the PCMCIA NIC. I got to thinking, this computer could function as some sort of server, but that's kind of a later story.
Now to the whole point of the story...I wondered if I could hook up a CD-Rom to this thing. I found an old IDE cable, chopped in half, and Spent Hours soldering the 40 pins to the back of the existing hard drive in there. I figured this might work to run a slave device. I finally finished the cable, and couldn't find my extra cdrom, so I tried some extra hard drives. I plugged in a 2gig with linux into the Laptop, and an old PSU. It actually booted! IT booted linux incredibly slowly, but it booted! I eventually found my old CD-ROM in the back of a cupboard, and promptly found out why I had put it there in the first place, It didn't work.
Now, I know the project didn't exactly work out all nice, but The main idea worked. Soldering the IDE cable into my laptop allowed me to run my Standard IDE devices. It's not much, but Im happy about it.
I had this sudden urge to fix the laptop the other day, as it has a perfectly good 1 Gig hd, and a 100Mbit nic. I found out what was wron with the keyboard, but kind of broke it a little more when fixing it. Throwing it across the room, shouting curse words, I wondered if the Mouse port would function as a keyboard port. Surprise, it did. I was happy, I had a working, uhh...Tethered laptop. I installed Dos, and finally got the Xircom drivers to find the PCMCIA NIC. I got to thinking, this computer could function as some sort of server, but that's kind of a later story.
Now to the whole point of the story...I wondered if I could hook up a CD-Rom to this thing. I found an old IDE cable, chopped in half, and Spent Hours soldering the 40 pins to the back of the existing hard drive in there. I figured this might work to run a slave device. I finally finished the cable, and couldn't find my extra cdrom, so I tried some extra hard drives. I plugged in a 2gig with linux into the Laptop, and an old PSU. It actually booted! IT booted linux incredibly slowly, but it booted! I eventually found my old CD-ROM in the back of a cupboard, and promptly found out why I had put it there in the first place, It didn't work.
Now, I know the project didn't exactly work out all nice, but The main idea worked. Soldering the IDE cable into my laptop allowed me to run my Standard IDE devices. It's not much, but Im happy about it.