My source system: laptop W2K, PCMCIA CF adapter card, 1 SanDisk SDCFB-64, dskprobe.exe, eltorito.img, m4ia-2.3pre1.img
My first hack. Bios flashed. Only after a few different attempts, I was able to boot to Midori Linux M4I.
Using Windows 2000, the tricky part is to put images on the external compact flash card with dskprobe.exe.
I would like to explicit a few points (that I have not found on this BBS), so that other people can save time, effort and frustration for their first IA-1 hack and don't accidentally overwrite their own source harddisk (which I didn't!).
I assume you have read instructions "Flashing your Compaq IA-1 ROM image".
My additional remarks:
A. I formatted the Compact Flash in the PCMCIA adapter card with W2K (File system = FAT),
each time before I wrote an .img to it (I have 1 CF)
B. Only for bringing over the bootable eltorito.img with Disk Probe,
I have experienced that it doesn't matter if Physical Drive or Logical Volume is being used.
However, for bringing over the new image (in my case: m4ia-2.3pre1.img) it DOES matter:
only Physical Drive will work!
c. Finding the logical drive (name) is easy: the same one as in Windows Explorer.
But no one has ever mentioned which physical drive (in my case: 0 or 1?) the removable PCMCIA CF Card is.
In making the wrong choice, one could end up writing an image to an internal harddisk and ruining it!
This is how I found out: once PhysicalDrive 0 or 1 are set to active, look for Drive - Volume Information.
Total Sectors x Sector Size = volume size (in bytes)
In comparing volume sizes of both PhysicalDrive 0 and 1, and knowing the volume size of your harddisk and CF,
you know which one is the removable disk (CF)
(my removable disk is D and it was PhysicalDrive 0 (which I did not expect!))
For certainty, you can also use Sandra (from SiSoftware) and compare volume details of drives.
D. The write to CF has finished as soon as the cursor on the opened image in Disk Probe starts blinking again.
E. After writing using Physical Drive, it looks like there is/are no files on the CF card. Don't worry, it is there!
F. Instruction "Flashing your Compaq IA-1 ROM image", point 20 says: When "Power Down" appears ...
I waited and waited, but I have never seen this happen.
So don't wait for it!
I hope this is valuable information. Good luck with your hack(s)! I'm going to play around.
By the way: I also have an IBM NetVista Internet Appliance that needs hacking.
Yet, I have to think about it's future usage.
If you are in a hurry, slow down ...
