How to get floppy drive to the CF-27? with parallel cable?

I have CF-27 without floppy drive so I have difficulties to add any other floppy drive. I saw that there is panasonic's cable adapter to install internal floppy drive to the parallel port, but I found many other parallel adapters too but when tried those, none were working on toughbook... shouldn't they have their own power source or is it using power through the parallel port???

What booting drives I could install that they would be recognized in BIOS? So far I found Panasonic external cd-rom drive which is installed using PCMCIA card but could BIOS recognize it at all?

Even thought I have hard drive caddy and hard drive too... I can't install any operating system. Everytime when I install win98 from other computer, when I plug the hard drive to the toughbook it says "invalid disk. Please remove disk and press enter"

 

The optical drive caddy is a great investment ,even with a inexpensive cd rom
The bios will see it so you will be able to select it as the first boot device to reinstall you o/s
The caddy will work in other models such as the cf-28 and cf-29 if you later decide to upgrade

Alex

 

My question was that will tougbook's BIOS recognize drivers thru PCMCIA card without drivers? The external cdrom is Panasonic KXL-810A but it does not relate to toughbook series, but it's at least same company so there is hope they supported it.

 

You should be able to put the hard drive in any other laptop to install Windows 98. Then just swap the hard drive into the Toughbook and it will find all the devices again. I did that with 98, 98SE and Millennium Edition using an old Dell Latitude CPi.

You can also make two partitions on your hard drive and copy the Windows CD to the second partition. You need a floppy drive and a Windows 95 or 98 boot disk though and then just use MSDOS to change to the setup directory on "D" and run the setup.exe file. I think there are at least two threads about that on here.

You can do the same with Windows 2000 and XP though by copying the i386 folder from the CD to the second partition. The latter works much better if you copy smartdrv to the floppy too.

Other ways of loading an OS include using a parallel port CD drive (but again you need a floppy drive to load the DOS drivers) or using an external USB IDE caddy attached to another computer with your laptop hard drive in it.

As for the CF-27 not recognising the hard drive, well that could be a hard drive fault, a motherboard fault on the CF-27 itself, or even using a drive too big for the BIOS to handle. I think the CF-27 is happiest with a 30 or 40g drive but it may handle more. It won't cope with modern 360gb drives for sure.

 

No but you can only boot to the built-in cd rom
As I said they are not too expensive
In the older computers I sometimes used a back-pak cd rom
It had the ability to interface with the parallel port
You would boot to floppy ,and there was a program on the floppy that would allow the computer to boot from the cd drive that was hooked up to either the parallel port or the pcmcia port

Alex

 

But I couldn't get floppy drive working with cf27 so it's out of question as well as using usb because bios won't recognize anything without drivers. The hard drive was only 2Gb and it recognized it! I am trying to install only ms-dos to hard drive and see if would work.

 

The Media Pocket in cf27 is not standard and I just simply cannot find anything that would fit the connection.

 

Did you try a USB floppy? Some pretty old systems will boot from it even though they will not boot from any other USB device.

 

As long as the system files are copied to the hard drive it'll work. I think that's where you've been going wrong. In MSDOS, if I remember correctly, it was as easy as typing sys c:

So when the Toughbook was saying "invalid disk" it was just because you didn't have the Windows 98 system files copied to the hard drive's boot record properly.

I can see what you did now. You must have set the hard drive as d: and then installed Windows 98 to it. The system files went onto c: on the laptop or desktop you were working on not onto the d: drive. So here (and I may be wrong), you should just go to a DOS prompt and type sys d: and then the drive would work in the Toughbook.

 

No, it really handled hard drive as C: I used desktop computer and simply just replaced the original 3.5" hard drive with 2.5" (with adapter) and installed from win98 cd-rom. That hard drive I installed win98, I can plug it to any other computer and it works fine but with toughbook it says invalid disk.

 

In that case it sounds like the Toughbook itself is faulty. If you are lucky then it's just a faulty hard drive caddy/connecting cable but it could be on the motherboard itself.

So try a different caddy. If that doesn't work try and get a new connecting cable (the bit that comes from the Toughbook itself) and replace it. And if that doesn't work just get another Toughbook CF-27.

 

This is how I did it in the past with the older models:

• I put the toughbook drive as primairy drive in my desktop.
• Booted from a Win95 or Win98 startup floppy.
• Used Fdisk to make an active partition on the toughbook hdd.
• Formatted the hdd bootable by using <format c: /s>.
• Copied the complete win95/win98/win2000 cd onto the toughbook hdd.
• Build the toughbook hdd back into the toughbook.
• Booted into DOS
• Run the windows setup from the HDD.

I also found out that the parallel cable and floppy drive of the older models (CF-25/CF-71) will work with the CF-27. But you need both. Floppy and cable.

 

The only way I've managed to replicate this problem is with a hard drive with a damaged boot sector but since your 2gb drive works in other computers it has to be a fault with the Toughbook itself.

I noticed from other posts that you got a Toughbook from a second-hand shop and were given one by someone else. I'm not sure which one you are using but you get what you pay for.

My advice is to go on ebay (UK since there's no Finnish version) and get another one as they are really cheap. Most sellers will ship internationally and label the package as "gift" to avoid import duty. The CF-27 is really only worth about £20 (or equivalent) nowadays so just keep checking for deals.

There's also a UK site which you can Google which has lots of CF-27s with hard drives and DVD drives already installed for £99 (hint: it will come up second on the results list on Google if you enter "£99 CF-27") which, although overpriced, will give you everything you need in one go without all the fussing around.

 

I bought used in here Finland and as I can see it is fully working and cost only 10 euros. The other one I got is just extra as I just wanted missing hard drive caddy and a friend from Ireland sent me whole toughbook with the caddy which positively surprised me and it's MkI toughbook and the bottom was swapped to mkIII, nothing else. In fact I suspect the hard drive was faulty. There was lilo boot loader in hard drive and even after formating it, it was still there until I managed to remove whole partition but still there were some problems. I believe the hard drive is faulty and I managed even to return it as it was way too expensive as it was originally noted to be 20 gb but was in fact only 2 gb. What a scam...

I am waiting for 30 Gb hard drive to arrive my post office... Anyway, I am pretty sure that I can install win98 because I have the panasonic PCMCIA cd-rom. I just install ms-dos from desktop and then install cd-rom dos driver and then plug it to the toughbook and install win98 cd-rom.

HEY! Only now I noticed that the cd-rom is actually SCSI and can be connected to any other desktop computer without PCMCIA interface card. About the PCMCIA card, the manual actually says "can be connected to any ZIP or JAZ drive"!!! How couldn't I notice this before??? This solves my problem about connecting my JAZ drives to the laptops!!! YEAH!

 

Hi CF27User,


If it is the hard disk I sent you in the caddy you are taking about. I have told you in an other post that the hard disk is dead and it was only to show you how the hard disk is fitted.

 

LOL, are you seriously thinking that I would been trying to use that spare non-working hard drive that you gave me??? I trashed it immediately. Hey, I have graduated from IT line so I know what I am doing

 

Hi CF27User

I was not saying you did not know what you were doing. I am sorry for making it look like that.

I just though that you were trying to use it when you said lilo which is a boot loader for linux or unix. I thought it was that hard disk. I use linux myself and that was my own drive that I used in an old compaq laptop before the drive died.

Please no hard feeling as I have none.

 

lol, I was just kidding. The hard drive was so badly damaged that I could clearly see it from it's outer shape that it's dead.