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IBM Travelstar 8E, 7.6 (8) GB, given to us with two Thinkpad 640X (233MHz, 
96MB), one of which came with 800MB IDE-CF flash drive.  Nice linux 
computers, with SBPro sound.  Flash drives reduce battery usage but these 
batteries last worked in 2006.  Replacing CMOS battery and unplugging 
replugging the keyboard got one operational.

Base stations with MIDI ports (rare) but no CD-ROM drives.  Plug-in floppy 
drives.  No speakers.  Lightweight esp with main battery removed.

Win98 Lite on the computer could not find GUI1.EXE (it is on the drive), 
but it worked in XP automatically (after a few minutes).

The Travelstar drive works in linux as Card "ATA/IDE Fixed Disk" (included 
by Steven in config - do you have one of these drivers Steven?) and 
function fixed-disk.  It has no manfid.  Running config gave me a series 
of error messages that it could not make /dev/hde1 through hde16 due to 
cat and expr command not found.  These are in busybox and the full 
versions would probably work to make hde devices.  The file 'ide' (which I 
must have installed as part of a Slackware pcmcia package) appears to be 
what is trying to make the devices.  Maybe I can replace it with something 
that mounts /dev/hde1 instead.  I unmounted it but cannot rmmod ide-cs for 
some reason.

cd /dev
mknod hde1 b 33 1
mknod hde2 b 33 2

mount /dev/hde1 /hd

It came with hde1 FAT partition (containing backup and mp3 and other 
software for Windows 95 through NT).

I could probably install a large BL to this drive and chroot to it on any 
computer with PCMCIA slots after booting to BL3 floppy with the kernel 
that I wanted for my full version of BL.  And use it for setting up 
laptops that have no USB ports (for USB flash or external drive), instead 
of parport zip or pcmcia network card.  Compress a working BL to .tgz, 
copy that, uncompress.

Sindi Keesan