My 50ct came in! Just waiting for the power supply. The guy I bought it from also threw in a port replicator, which allows me to use an external keyboard and monitor.
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Long Beach, CA
jefftheworld wrote:
The CF will act exactly as a HDD would.
Ah I see. And the internal HD, would it just stay in there, while I just boot from the CF?
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SLC, UT
I think he meant to use a CF to IDE adapter, which would essentially turn the CF into a solid state ide drive. So you would have to replace the HDD with that.
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Planet Zaxxon
There is great information about MS-DOS and IDE to CF drives/SSD's in this post that I mentioned in my first response! 
http://chipmusic.org/forums/topic/8892/ … msdossb16/
Last edited by Warez Waldo (Nov 6, 2014 8:54 pm)
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Minneapolis
I think you're probably gonna want to look up information about DOS and old PC standards more so than anything else.
In general, floppies will work well for pushing small amounts of data, but you're going to be extremely frustrated when it comes time to try to move bigger files. Remember that 1.4 megabyte is not very big. USB drives will not work on this, even if you do find a PCMCIA to USB card. I'd look for a PCMCIA CD drive that you can get DOS drivers for, or a ZIP drive. A ZIP drive will be hard to find, and when you go shopping for one do not just assume from the 25-pin connector that it's parallel port compatible. SCSI drives also use this same plug! As a last resort, you can run data through the serial port using the port expander.
This machine only has a 75mhz processor and maxes out at 32 megabytes of RAM, so I would only go as high as Windows 3.1 if you don't want this thing to be cripplingly slow. Also, even if you run DOS 4.0, you will only be able to reach a maximum disk size of 4GB, and each partition can only be 2GB in size. This is a hard limitation of FAT16 file formatting. For this reason I would really consider an IDE to Compact Flash adapter and just get a cheap 2 or 4GB CF card. No point in going for anything more fancy, especially as the drive controller in this is so slow you will get no gains from a modern SSD.
Lastly, it should be possible to image the CF card to be bootable on the Libretto so that you don't have to go through the hair-tearing "fun" of trying to install an OS on a machine so old.
Last edited by arfink (Nov 7, 2014 2:27 pm)
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USA
The libretto bios is old. I had to partition an SD card to 2Gb sizes for it to recognize the drives. It works 10x faster than the HDD that came with though, and your battery lasts maybe 20% longer. The drivers are weird too, I had lots of keyboard errors and such when I used DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11, though it ran super fast. I switched to Win 98 SE and the restart in MS-DOS mode and run it and that seems to be the most efficient speed/errorless way to go, plus having file management and mass storage through the PCMCIA slot is handy.
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Long Beach, CA
stargazer wrote:
I think he meant to use a CF to IDE adapter, which would essentially turn the CF into a solid state ide drive. So you would have to replace the HDD with that.
I gathered as much, but from all the mod/conversion tutorials I'm seeing, it seems like they're just putting it into the PCMCIA slot on the side and not opening up the libretto and removing anything.
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SLC, UT
Well, the hard drive on the libretto is accessed from the side. There's a door you unscrew and then slide the hard drive out.
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Long Beach, CA
Hmmm, if I try to shut down via MS-DOS (aka press the power button), it takes me to a weird countdown screen, but doesn't actually turn off. It goes into a sleep mode. How do I do a full shut down from DOS?
Edit: Initially it showed a picture of the monitor. To the right was a set of what seemed to be discs. To the left was a chip.
Under it was a big "X" labeled with "backspace." The monitor (image) eventually turns black and just kinda goes to "sleep."
Last edited by Terbografx (Nov 9, 2014 6:30 am)
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Long Beach, CA
jefftheworld wrote:
Does shutdown /s not work?
It does not 
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USA
There is an overclocking tutorial out there for libretto. Might be a fun mod. But really you need MMX is you want to do anything. I think Waldo was on to something in that first response.
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The Rubber Man
Terbografx wrote:
I will soon be a Libretto 50ct owner.
Wow, a beautiful machine!