It doesn’t panic right away, it gets a little into booting. #linux #VintageComputing #RetroComputing

Digging around for adapters and discovered another weapon in my arsenal! It's a little adapter that converts 40 pin IDE to 44 pin laptop IDE. Maybe I can hook the hard drive direct to a desktop computer so I can back it up? #linux #VintageComputing #RetroComputing

Nope. Drive doesn't spin up at all. Don't know where the adapter came from, maybe it's broken. Although there's really not much to it. #linux #VintageComputing #RetroComputing

It looks like the adapter might actually be broken! Or at least made wrong. Took a bit of searching to find out what the 44 pin IDE pinout is. Apparently there are *two* 5V pins (one for motor, one for logic) and only one is connected on this adapter. No problem, I'll drill a "via" and run a short jumper wire through. #linux #VintageComputing #RetroComputing

The adapter didn't work. No matter what I did the desktop wouldn't recognize the drive. I went into the BIOS and tried all the auto detect modes and I could hear it clicking the drive. Even tried manually entering the CHS. But whenever it booted it insisted there was a problem with the drive. #linux #VintageComputing #RetroComputing

I did however finally get the laptop to boot #linux! I switched to a Damn Small Linux CD. The laptop only has 16MB of RAM so I told it `lowram noswap` and use text console only, but it still had a kernel panic paging fault. Then I tried `mem=15MB lowram noswap` and it came up with no paging fault and I got to a shell! #VintageComputing #RetroComputing