My Libretto 50CT had been sat in a box for many years. I had last played with it probably close to 10 years ago.. at the time I had resurrected it with a fresh Win95 install, and had purchased a new battery pack. Then it went in a box and hadn't come out til last weekend..
It was not happy. Wouldn't boot, so I assumed the drive was dead. And to make sure of that I had it hooked up in an external case to do some forensics.. and I'm not sure what I did wrong but the magic smoke was released. Ok - drive actually dead now.
It was a noisy old thing anyway, so I grabbed a mSata 64GB SSD, and imaged what I believed was the original image for these things... and ended up with Windows ME in Japanese..! I then found a Win95 image that was also reported to be the original image... This time it worked and the little guy was back and happy again..
So I removed the drive, and inserted another freshly imaged SSD... this time with something more interesting than Windows...
It's very usable.. :albeit in greyscale for some reason..
I'm going to leave it like this and fix up a couple of things like replacing the PRAM battery - it was starting to leak so it's been removed. I have the mini port expander, and a few PCMCIA ethernet cards so will try and get it online. And also see if the floppy drive is functional - I recall it wasn't last time I tried, but I've fixed up a few dozen floppy drives (Mac and Commodore) in the years since so I might have more luck this time..
It was not happy. Wouldn't boot, so I assumed the drive was dead. And to make sure of that I had it hooked up in an external case to do some forensics.. and I'm not sure what I did wrong but the magic smoke was released. Ok - drive actually dead now.
It was a noisy old thing anyway, so I grabbed a mSata 64GB SSD, and imaged what I believed was the original image for these things... and ended up with Windows ME in Japanese..! I then found a Win95 image that was also reported to be the original image... This time it worked and the little guy was back and happy again..
So I removed the drive, and inserted another freshly imaged SSD... this time with something more interesting than Windows...
It's very usable.. :albeit in greyscale for some reason..
I'm going to leave it like this and fix up a couple of things like replacing the PRAM battery - it was starting to leak so it's been removed. I have the mini port expander, and a few PCMCIA ethernet cards so will try and get it online. And also see if the floppy drive is functional - I recall it wasn't last time I tried, but I've fixed up a few dozen floppy drives (Mac and Commodore) in the years since so I might have more luck this time..