Superfish wrote:

I recently bought a second hand Thinkpad 600e to relive the glory days, and so far I have managed to install Windows 98SE.
I also picked up a PCMCIA Compact Flash adaptor, and a SanDisk Ultra 16GB CF card with a view to using it as removable storage for programs and games.

Hi and good morning,
I do know little about the Thinkpad 600e, but I've got an old Compaq Armada running 98SE.
Whenever I try to to run FDISK on the command prompt, the limit is about ~8GB.
It happens with both USB card readers and PCMCIA adapters for CF cards,
if I remember correctly.

PS: Welcome to Vogons! 😀

Thanks for the welcome. I'm in Ireland so it's very early here.
So I guess I should try 2 8GB partitions? Ill, just partition the CF card on my win10 machine and ill let you know how it goes.

No luck. I made a partition smaller than 8GB, but the symptoms are the same.
I forgot to mention before, but when I enable the CF card using the Thinkpad configuration utility I get an error message: "The following device is not working or the driver for the device has not loaded properly. Device name: SanDisk-SDP".
Thanks all the same for your time, and have a nice day.

it may need a custom driver since is basically a card reader, sadly i don't know if such driver exists, only compact flash are working without drivers because they're basically IDE in PCMCIA (ISA based)

sounds similar to when you insert a USB stick in Win98, which I guess you are basically doing as it's a different type of mass media device.

You may get lucky by installing the unofficial service pack. This adds generic drivers for USB sticks so maybe it'll also work for your card reader?

Hi there,

After reading your comment chinny22 I installed the Unofficial service pack.
That took a long time, and there was a few errors, but it still works 😀
So I got is working guys. I updated the driver for the CF card after the service pack install and now it gives me a different error.
"SanDisk-SDP: This device cannot find any free Interrupt Request (IRQ) resources to use (Code 12). If you want to use this device you must disable another device that is using the resources this device needs."
So I ran the troubleshooting wizard and disabled the infra red port and success. The drive is now assigned a letter and it's working. Copied a game and it loaded just fine.

Thanks again to everyone that helped.

I probably should create a new thread for this question, but I figured this question is somewhat related so I'll tack it on to the end of this thread. If this is not OK I will understand.

I would like to access the PCMCIA CF card in DOS as a drive. Is this possible? I see there are Cardsoft drivers on the Lenovo ThinkPad 600e driver library. Would this be the driver I would use?

I recently set up my ThinkPad X24 as a Windows 98 SE retro gaming machine and love it so far. I've had no issues at all so far with the CF card reader. One tip I can give you is: Insert the CF card before starting the installation of Win98 so it will automatically pick up the drivers for it.

Also, do not install the unofficial service pack. It's not really necessary and some of the things it installs and changes aren't all that helpful. _some_ details (in german) here.

Check for drivers for your here. I suggest installing Graphics, Sound, Network and Chipset.
As for Windows Updates I suggest Direct X 9.0c, Windows Installer Update, IE60SP1, Windows Media Player 9 and .NET Framework 2.0. That's what I have, and everything is working just fine. (If you want to look at some more tools, look here.)

As for partition sizes: I've on 32GB partition on my 32 GB CF Card and it works great. Regarding DOS, you find the DOS driver at the link I mentioned earlier.

Cheers,

-joe

Thanks for the tips joedemo42. I already installed the unofficial service pack, but next time I install windows I'll do it your way. I'm just finding my feet at the mo. I was quite young when I played these games, so I'm learning and relearning most of it.

Did you get you CF card to work? If so, how?

I got the CF card to work with Win98se using the unofficial service pack. I mentioned that in a post above. I haven't attempted to get it working in DOS yet. At the moment I'm copying stuff from the CF card to the hard drive using windows, and then booting into DOS to load. I'm surprised how many DOS programs refuse to work in windows, but it's fine as long as they work in the end.

Is there a way to make it work without the unofficial service pack? I am so worried that the pack could break Windows 98SE.