First post, by Edman
Hi guys, in short - I have an old but working IBM Thinkpad 560 (133MHz, 40MB RAM, 4GB HDD). Notebook has an external FDD and PCMCIA slot for two cards. There is an external CD-ROM ARGOSY CD930-24 (24X) connected through the PCMCIA card. There was Windows 98SE installation on the HDD (CD-ROM worked fine there), HDD failed, all data lost. I don't have any drivers or floppy disks to any hardware listed, nor I have been able to find any on the net. Every time I ger closer, the link is long dead (like this http://www.cdrom-drivers.com/).
Thanks to this article http://thanksalotman.blogspot.cz/2009/02/dos- … pi-drivers.html I have managed to - what it seems like - wake up the PCMCIA slot (it now powers up the CDROM on boot), but ROM itself is not detected (through ATA ATAPI). I have somewhat hard time understanding all the stuff about autoexec and config + the drivers, it's a little overwhelming. Don't know where to get or how to implement another random driver to try my luck.
Since I have managed to deconstruct that machine and put it back together without any issue for the puropose of thorough cleaning, I can singlehandedly remove the drive and copy Windows setup files on it directly, no fuss. In case anyone's wondering - I'm going to replace the failed drive with an IDE/SD card module in following days. I just wish to make this work too.
I'm missing the correct CD-ROM driver. There is an ordinary LG slim drive in the ARGOSY unit. But since it has its own logic boards, I guess it does not matter. ARGOSY does not have anything on their web on it. The unit is long forgotten.