Conversation

Notices

1. Manawyrm | Sarah (manawyrm@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Oct-2023 15:57:58 JST Manawyrm | Sarah

   My classic ThinkPad T43 (from 2005) used IDE/PATA storage. That's slow and unreliable, especially after the PATA->SATA bridge IBM included.

   Instead, let's use NVMe SSDs in the ExpressCard/34 slot!
   I modified the BIOS to include a custom Option ROM, which can translate the BIOS disk accesses into NVMe.

   Windows XP, Debian 12, MS-DOS 6 can boot fine from NVMe!

   Option ROM Source:
   https://github.com/Manawyrm/nvme-int13h-optionrom

   YouTube-Video in Action:
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVKbFLtXLYM

   • Arkadiusz Wieczorek (arek@mastodon.internet-czas-dzialac.pl)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Oct-2023 17:15:42 JST Arkadiusz Wieczorek

     in reply to

     @manawyrm it's super cool! Maybe could I make some tweaks with my IBM600, R60e or X200 🤔

   • Arkadiusz Wieczorek (arek@mastodon.internet-czas-dzialac.pl)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Oct-2023 22:12:04 JST Arkadiusz Wieczorek

     in reply to

     @manawyrm if you ever prepare something for the *200 series please ping me 💛

   • Manawyrm | Sarah (manawyrm@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Oct-2023 22:12:05 JST Manawyrm | Sarah

     in reply to

     • Arkadiusz Wieczorek

     @arek The *60 and *200 series devices were also what I was thinking about. Those could probably really benefit from a nice NVMe SSD and they‘re still not using UEFI (unlike my trusty ex daily driver the T430 (not T43))

   • Manawyrm | Sarah (manawyrm@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Oct-2023 23:42:11 JST Manawyrm | Sarah

     in reply to

     More random pictures from the development process :)

   • Manawyrm | Sarah (manawyrm@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Oct-2023 23:42:12 JST Manawyrm | Sarah

     in reply to

     Samsung offers a native NVMe driver, which will run on XP. I had to write my own txtsetup.oem file to be able to load the driver in the XP setup routine. Included the driver using nLite into a XP SP3 ISO.

     Modding the BIOS requires arcane knowledge, which I managed to figure out by trial & error and reading old russian forum posts.
     Here's what I did: https://gist.github.com/Manawyrm/d4a6fe18ca4c129179f527e9d0854099
     (can't share the tools/binaries used, they're a little bit hard to find, but out there)

     Arkadiusz Wieczorek repeated this.
   • Manawyrm | Sarah (manawyrm@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Oct-2023 23:42:13 JST Manawyrm | Sarah

     in reply to

     I already bought a proper, internal ExpressCard/34 to M.2 2242 adapter from China. Hasn't arrived yet.
     ExpressCard/34 is just PCIe x1 (and 3.3V power), just like the M.2 M+B key slot.

     This was my first BIOS mod, using a lot of crazy PhoenixBIOS tools, hex-editing and crossing fingers.
     I had to do the "crisis recovery" procedure 4 times.

     Speeds are around 250 MByte/s (RW), limited by the PCIe 1.0 x1 (2.5GT/s) slot.
     Newer laptops (like a T430) could do PCIe 3.0 x1, reaching 1GByte/s!