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We were given a NEC Versa/m100 (100MHz 486 DX4) with 16MB RAM, which 
starts to boot from floppy disk then stops (booting from PC DOS), and 
refuses to boot from a known good hard drive, or from a floppy drive that 
works in another computer and fits into this one, but has a PCMCIA boot 
feature in BIOS setup.  Presumably the FD/IDE controllers are bad.

No USB or CD-ROM drive.  No zip drive boot.
We have an external CD-ROM drive but there is no way to boot from it.

What PCMCIA devices are bootable?  We have only compact flash card (about 
8MB) and pcmcia adaptor.  Worked as hdc1 and function 4 (ide_cs) in 
another computer.  Is it likely to boot?  I could try formatting it to 
ext2 in another laptop, make active, install to hd as hdc1, and use lilo. 
Just for fun.

We also have a 386 with working floppy but dead HD which I could 
conceivably use to run BL3 from parport zip drive, with 4MB RAM and serial 
port (for external modem).  DOS would run faster (from floppy drive - lynx 
for DOS with the Arachne dialer).

Sindi Keesan