There are two ways to recover data from an obsolete storage medium. One way is to pull out all the tools in the hacker’s kit — with logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, and bit-banged software in a desperate attempt to reverse engineer the original protocol. The other way is to have a really, really deep junk bin that just happens to contain exactly the right pieces that would have been used decades ago.
For recovering data from a 25-year-old PCMCIA memory card, [Dave] from Vintage Apparatus chose the latter method. But to be fair, characterizing the stash of gear he had to select from as a “junk bin” is pretty insulting. It’s more like a museum of retro technology, which just so happened to hold Toshiba Libretto, a subnotebook computer hailing from the late 1990s. The machine sports a pair of PCMCIA slots and was just the thing to read the data from the old 32 MB SanDisk flash card, which once lived in a backpack-mounted GPS system for surveyors.
If this hack sounds as easy as plugging things into an old computer, you’d be right — if you just happen to have a stack of floppies containing the Windows 98 drivers for said things. So [Dave]’s task became a game of finding the right combination of cards that already had the drivers installed and would provide the connectivity needed to get the data off the flash card. Between a suspiciously crunchy-sounding floppy drive and an Ethernet card dongle badly in need of some contact cleaner, cobbling together the right hardware was a bit of a chore. After that, a lot of the hack was [Dave] just remembering how we used to do things back in the day, with the eventual solution being transferring over the files to an FTP server on a Raspberry Pi.
The video below tells the whole saga, but the real treat might just be the Vintage Apparatus collection of gear. Incidentally, we really like [Dave]’s idea for storing associated bits and bobs.
I have one of those pcmcia SRAM card 2mb that i used to flash usr2450 routers with linuxap back in 2000, in the pre-openwrt days. One of the few distro to support it for the Demolinux livecd.
This is painful to watch. There are much more recent laptops with PCMCIA/CardBus slots. I have a Thinkpad T60p here with USB 2.0 and gigabit ethernet ports.
Also I see a serial port, Null Modem to anything with a serial port.
But is it 5v compliant? There were different flavours of that card format you know. But your T60p is also nice. :)
The T60 schematic I found contains a TPS2211A to switch the CardBus slot between 5V and 3.3V.
As fragile as a T60p is (at least the 14″ ones), it makes a perfect ‘tweener machine. CardBus and ExpressCard, Bluetooth and IrDA, USB and serial+parallel with an ultrabay module or dock… They’ll also run XP, probably the best Windows version to move between older and newer systems.
The Sandisk flash card shown is a PCMCIA/Cardbus ATA drive and can be hooked up to a standard ATA interface with a passive adapter, just like CF cards.
Yuuup. Nothing here was actually difficult.
This is all so true. Out of the many options he had – he took the most painfull and most complicated. I guess he just wanted to wipe the dust off that cute machine. Oh wait – didn’t he note something about cleaning cloths…
It’s not like the old X terminal I have that boots off a piece of “linear” PCMCIA flash (not CF, not ATA) and drivers for this class of device disappeared with the linux PCMCIA subsystem rewrite…
It’s not like it’s a hard protocol, I should see if I can write a driver for it. But it’d be faster to just install a 2.2-era kernel.
I think Demolinux 1.0 had a 2.2 kernel with the right support. If my memory is correct, it was not working under a 2.4 kernel like Knoppix. I could find a Demolinux 3.0 here, but not 1.0:
https://archiveos.org/demolinux/
Just got a copy of Demolinux 1.0 ISO image, shoot me an email at zoobab AT gmail if you want a copy i will put it somewhere.
Why don’t you upload it to archive.org that anyone in need of a copy can grab it from the software section?
Crazy to think that’s out large 32MB of flash memory was back then! Today, in a tiny 25.5mm by 18mm by 3.1mm package (ESP32 SoC), you can get 32MB of flash memory PLUS a dual core 240 MHz processor, WiFi, Bluetooth, and so much more!
A memory card and a SoM is not a good comparison. A better one would be between the memory card and a micro SD card or between a memory card and a flash chip.
It might shock you, but you can buy 1TB of flash in a 15 mm by 11 mm by 0.7 mm micro SD card.
Hm..I would use my PCMCIA/CF to SCSI Adapter and connect the AH2940 with a PCIe to PCI
Adapter to a normal modern PC. Is that to easy? :-)
Olaf
I had to dump an Intel Flash100 card from a Nortel PBX, it predated the card ID header, so you need a Linux kernel with anonymous PCMCIA flash driver, and the right magic incantations to tell it the card is there.
I cheated… I just bought one of these: https://www.amazon.com/pcmcia-usb-adapter/s?k=pcmcia+to+usb+adapter
Is there ever going to be a HaD Retro Tech article on how PCMCIA worked with DOS/Windows, and how it worked so much better With Windows 9x?
I still have my libretto somewhere. Back in the day I upgraded the HDD to a whopping 1GB! Happy days.
PCMCIA — Now there’s an acronym I’ve not heard in some time. IIRC, it stands for “People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms”.
He wanted to install Chrome on a win98 libretto? Really? Talk about clueless.
Man that Xircom Ethernet adapter was ubiquitous back in the day. At my shop we had a whole bin full of the dongles. Ah, memories.
So the trick to reading a PCMCIA memory card is…stick it in a PCMCIA slot?
I still have 4 of these Librettos 110CT at home. I even was able with a mod to have 96Mb.
Two of them have Linux 2.6, one with W2K and one with XP.
I did a lot of stuff with the Margo DVD-to-Go card which is a hardware DVD encoder sending the frames directly into the video chip NM2760 using the ZV bus.
Did a lot of reverse engineering on the windows drivers to get this running under Linux.
Learned a great deal on both windows and Linux kernel debugging and reverse engineering using IDA Pro.
I miss my libretto. I’d love to use it’s form factor to swap out for new internals. But second hand prices are crazy.