Ressurecting an Omnibook 530

[HarlandC]

I am starting this thread to try to document what I have gone through trying to get my Omnibook 530 up and running.

I bought this OB530 back in the late 90's. It came with the base unit, a power supply, and two hard drives. One 40MB one 130MB. IIRC, neither one would boot, and I had no way to put either drive into anything to try to see if it was broken, so the OB was not usable. I bought a 170MB drive from ebay, but this one was blank, so no luck with it either.

I was finally able to use a friend's laptop to try to look at the drives, and surprisingly, was able to see that they were okay, (again IIRC, it's been a long time!) just that the bootable flag was removed from the partition on each drive. I set both to bootable and was able to boot the OB.

The 40MB drive had the OB drive image on it, but with windows removed, so only Dos 6.2.
The 130MB drive had the full OB image including windows 3.1.

At this point I didn't have use for the little laptop, so it was stored away.

[HarlandC]

Some time later, I pulled the OB530 out of storage and see what else I could do with it. At that time I had found a Win95 HD image and was able to get it put onto the 170MB drive. This worked well.

I remember testing both other drives and making sure they both worked at that time. Nice!
I also tested out a PCMCIA NIC that I had and was able to get it onto my home network.

But I didn't have a lot of time for the little laptop, so again it went back into storage.

A few years passed and I decided to open the case for some reason. I had found a PDF of the service manual, so that was very helpful. When I opened the case up, I lost the tiny spring that holds the mouse latch, so that the mouse would not stay stowed away. Upset at myself, I used some painters tape to stow the mouse and put the laptop away again.

[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.

[HarlandC]

I had forgotten about the battery.
At some point after first buying the laptop the battery died. It holds no charge whatsoever.
To protect the laptop, I had been storing it with the battery pack removed.

Since it is NiMH, I may try to tear the old one apart and replace the cells. I did pull the case apart and measure the cells inside. The cells are each 43mm long and 17mm diameter. This makes them a 4/5 A size. I can get replacements from amazon if I decide to replace them.