Many of IBM Thinkpads have this feature. The following models that I own or used to own can boot from PCMCIA card: 330C, 360C, 755CD, 560.
And it's also no driver free access to PCMCIA card if you don't boot from it. Which is strange given that BIOS can detect it. I think someone on this forum had a laptop that could access it in DOS without drivers. I'll try to find the post.
760 series Thinkpads have the PCMCIA boot option in the Easy Setup (BIOS), but this option does not seem to work.
EDIT: there it is MiTAC 4022 can access PCMCIA storage natively MiTAC 4022 - a vintage 486 notebook (1994)

PCD-4ND was also my first laptop back in late 90s (it was already old), i have it now too, but not the same unit 😀 actually I didn't know that you can boot from PCMCIA with it. But I fixed CF-PCMCIA problem some years ago (to use that card with Windows), I figured out that PCMCIA can use 3.3V and 5V mode, but this laptop seems to work only with 5V cards. I don't exactly remember what I did, but I just removed metal cover of CF-PCMCIA adapter and either cut some pins related to 3.3V or soldered some jumper wires to force particular operation mode. I just covered that adapter with duct tape, so I can take a photo if I find it. I also can test if CF card will actually work as boot device there.

BTW i remember (1998?) a guy selling this used laptop in an outdoor marketplace, it was placed on his car, powering it off car battery and he was pointing on PCMCIA slots, saying that you can expand the storage here, 2 x 500MB or something along these lines. Now I wonder if he had experience of using them as boot devices 😉

Edit: Do you have QWERTY keyboard in this laptop? I have never seen non-german layout in this model (although the manual specifies various layouts)

diagon_swarm wrote on 2020-09-26, 19:00:

From my experience, most PC laptops did not offer PCMCIA boot. I went through my collection and found two no-name 486 laptops, that also have PCMCIA support in BIOS. One has the AMI BIOS and if the PCMCIA boot support is enabled, it allows to boot from PCMCIA 1.0 cards (ATA cards are ignored in boot). If the DOS is booted from the SRAM card, it works with simple programs, but file managers and more complex programs either refuse to start, or they freeze the computer. It seems that the support is not so good here.

The other laptop has Phoenix BIOS (different version than PCD-4ND), but once the system starts booting from the SRAM card, it hangs with floppy drive doing a lot of noisy sounds, every time the computers touches the card.

Because you are doing it wrong with these BIOS models. Support from these BIOS manufacturers is simple boot-time support (specially AMI/SystemSoft (yuck... systemsoft...)). You need to prepare your SRAM card installed DOS to load the full pcmcia enabler or card services + ata drivers to get the full support. Akin to the old "network bootdisk" but for PCMCIA storage support.

hyoenmadan wrote on 2020-09-27, 02:26:

Because you are doing it wrong with these BIOS models. Support from these BIOS manufacturers is simple boot-time support (...)

I assume that this is the case with AMI* (and only for linear PCMCIA, because it does not even try to boot from ATA cards), but not Phoenix. PCD-4ND clearly works well with linear PCMCIA without any driver. The second Phonenix-equipped laptop should work the same, but it has some HW conflict issues that prevents it from reading at least the boot record from the linear card (and ATA cards are completely ignored), so a tweaked DOS with the card services would not help here. Somebody told me that the PCMCIA boot support (including PCMCIA-ATA) on his ThinkPad works only if a hard drive is installed in the computer. This second Phoenix-equipped laptop has faulty HDD that is not recognized by the BIOS, so maybe this can lead to the issue where the drives are incorrectly assigned (I will test it one day...).

*) Who knows, maybe it would have worked properly if I had used an SRAM card with the attribute memory (for auto-configuration).

adalbert wrote on 2020-09-27, 01:20:

PCD-4ND was also my first laptop back in late 90s (it was already old), i have it now too, but not the same unit 😀 actually I didn't know that you can boot from PCMCIA with it. But I fixed CF-PCMCIA problem some years ago (to use that card with Windows), I figured out that PCMCIA can use 3.3V and 5V mode, but this laptop seems to work only with 5V cards. I don't exactly remember what I did, but I just removed metal cover of CF-PCMCIA adapter and either cut some pins related to 3.3V or soldered some jumper wires to force particular operation mode. I just covered that adapter with duct tape, so I can take a photo if I find it. I also can test if CF card will actually work as boot device there.

BTW i remember (1998?) a guy selling this used laptop in an outdoor marketplace, it was placed on his car, powering it off car battery and he was pointing on PCMCIA slots, saying that you can expand the storage here, 2 x 500MB or something along these lines. Now I wonder if he had experience of using them as boot devices 😉

Edit: Do you have QWERTY keyboard in this laptop? I have never seen non-german layout in this model (although the manual specifies various layouts)

Haha, this is also not the unit*, I bought back in the late 90s. The original one has a (smaller) crappy monochrome screen, no sound chip and just 50MHz i486DX2 (4MB on-board later expanded to 20MB. The one from the photo is much better - a 75MHz Intel DX4, 10.5" DSTN color screen and built-in SB Pro sound. Some of my friends had this machine with a very nice 9.5" TFT (oh, how I envied them 😁).

This 3.3V/5V issue is interesting. If you have any photo/HOWTO regarding this, I would like to see it. It would be nice to be able to use CF cards in this laptop.

Btw I've never seen this laptop with any other layout than the German one. However, here in Czech Republic, it was common to see the German layout as many laptops were brought here from Germany/Austria.

*) Here is the comparison of both units I have now: https://swarmik.tumblr.com/post/164890487174/ … rix-lcd-screens

diagon_swarm wrote on 2020-09-27, 08:29:

This 3.3V/5V issue is interesting. If you have any photo/HOWTO regarding this, I would like to see it. It would be nice to be able to use CF cards in this laptop.

All right, i found it 😀 you just need to disconnect Pin 43: VS1/RFSH and Pin 57: VS2/RFU. I desoldered them and put some insulating tape under them (I also put some tape on the top, to prevent touching the metal case by protruded pins). It should be possible to just cut them off without desoldering, but that would obviously be irreversible.
BTW maybe you should look for some PCMCIA documentation and see if these pins can be left floating, or should be pulled to ground or VCC. I left them floating, but maybe there is more appropriate way of doing it.

CF card is assigned as drive A:

But it can't boot - I get "Diskette read failure".

I used 2GB card with pre-installed Windows 95 (pulled out of Libretto) and 32MB card with pre-installed DOS, they behaved in the same way (detected but not booting). Maybe they would behave differently when formatted in machine or used with disk overlay software, I would need to test it.

diagon_swarm wrote on 2020-09-27, 08:29:

Some of my friends had this machine with a very nice 9.5" TFT (oh, how I envied them 😁).

I actually managed to find one with 10,2" TFT (NEC NL6448AC32-01) and I was really happy about that 😁 but I didn't know that some models were stripped out of sound card. So it looks like they were available in wide variety of configurations, from "cheap" (AKA not very expensive) to very expensive, with different screen size/type, memory etc. That 10,2" TFT is pretty non-standard size, most laptops had either 9,4" or 10,4" TFTs so it would be hard to find a replacement if it ever breaks.

Thanks, I will look at the documentation to fully understand this hack.

This diskette failure means, that it skipped the PCMCIA card and went to another device (when the PCMCIA boot is set, it will try floppy as 2nd and HDD as 3rd). All my laptops just ignored ATA/CF. I don't think that any special version of a DOS/Windows boot loader would help. With linear/SRAM cards, these computers are able to tell you if the "disk" is a non-system one or wrong.

I think the whole first generation of PCD-4ND machines was without any sound chip. They added it with some revision and presumably only as an optional part (like the IR port). There should be even two different sound chips available (I think that one of them is 8bit only, but not sure).

Did any of you ever get this to work? I have 3 of these and one of them has a broken IDE flex cable. I tried to use a CF->PCMCIA adapter years ago, but I thought it fried the CF card. Might have been a broken adapter or the 3.3V issue you mention here. Would be nice to resurrect it!

Btw mine all have danish keyboard layout s- they were used in banks here, which is where I got mine in the late 90s/early 00s, as my mom worked there. Our first PC was a Siemens Nixdorf Scenic 4H DX2 that she bought via the bank, but unfortunately it was scrapped years ago 🙁 I wish I had kept that one instead of the laptops.

Two of my laptops have sound cards, two with TFT one with DSTN. Two with Pentium 90 and one with a DX4 75. The pentiums tend to overheat when playing MP3s.