Ressurecting an Omnibook 530

[HarlandC]

Which leads me to now. As a present for my wife, since it is actually *her* laptop, I decided to try to get this back into a working order that she can use.

For the mouse latch spring, I ended up finding a small spring (about the size of a spring from a pen, but much lighter) that I cut and put in place. This works to hold the mouse in place but is a little bit sticky when releasing the mouse. It took a few tries to find a usable spring.

The drives are a disappointment. The two larger drives both died. I can't get anything from either one.

I had been thinking about trying to use flash media of some sort in place of the hard drive, and with the failure of the larger drives this has given me a push.

I bought a PCMCIA card that is a Compact Flash reader. The amazon description said that it acts as an ATA device, so I was hopeful that I could use it to replace a hard drive card. It also came with a 512MB CF card.

It took some work, and another laptop, but I was able to get the 512MB CF partitioned (one partition) and set to bootable. Then I put it in the OB530 and formatted it (with /sys) from DOS. I manually copied over everything from the 40MB drive. The 512MB CF is now bootable and is a clone of the 40MB HDD. And it boots faster. I made another clone of the 40MB HDD onto a 128MB CF card that I had lying around. I plan to keep this one as a backup in case the 40MB HDD dies.

I picked up a copy of Win3.1 from a site that seems to be legit and have installed it onto the 512. It was a pain to do since the Win3.1 images were floppies and I don't have a known working floppy drive, nor do I have a floppy drive for the OB530. To extract the floppy images I had to mount each image onto a virtual machine then copy the files from it. I ended up putting each floppy worth of files on C:\tmp\win\disk# on the 512 and installed from there.

At this point I have a working DOS 6.2 OS with a semi-working Windows 3.1 on the 512MB CF card. I say semi-working because I cannot find drivers for the mouse or sound, so I can only navigate Windows by keyboard.