Interesting Laptop Mod

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.

thats great!
do you know if you can hook up laptop drives to desktop pc though?

kevin_bouchard said:

thats great!
do you know if you can hook up laptop drives to desktop pc though?

Click to expand...

Yeah, they even make $5 adapters to do this too.

do you know where to buy one of these adapters or make one?
thanks for the fast reply

I just got seom from a local computer show here..I'll see if I can find em on someone's web site..

you know, come to think of it, If i plugged the 40 pin plug that I soldered into the motherboard, and wired up 5 volts to the hard drive, I could use it to run laptop hard drives on my pc.

I just bought an old Dell Latitude XPi off Ebay for $26 and a docking station for $5. the problem is that it doesnt have a cd rom drive. The dock has a SCSI port and I am borrowing an external SCSI cd rom from a friend. It has been a pain trying to install software and trying to install Linux on it because for some reason programs dont like probing the dock for devices. I think this laptop has definite potential.
The purpose of this laptop was originally to be a MP3 player for my car, but after getting it and finding that it has no sound card, 8m ram, and small hd, I think I will use it for something else rather than spend the extra money for a larger HD, ram, and PCMCIA sound card. The only really good thing about it is that it boots to win95 in under 25 seconds.

when i got rid of one of my old coputers that i played starcraft on, i was forced to use a gateway laptop, pentium 266 mhz, 6 gig hd, 33.6 k modem yada yada yada, well anyways i cant stand using that tiny little keyboard and the touch pad or the looking at the 14.1 inch screen for extended periods, like in a starcraft game, so i would take a regular ps/2 keyboard and mouse and use them then plug a big monitor into the serial port in the back and to my suprise it worked, wow i thoght to myself, not very portable anymore but hey now im comfortable, hehe i left that setup on the kitchen table for a few weeks until i got a new comp.