[rescue] OT: "Serial port"-less laptop.. Options?

[Isaac]

There are PCMCIA card services for DOS - but they cost money and are
barely available. (SystemSoft still sells CardSoft for DOS, even though
it's officially discontinued.)

They may not work with your cardbus controller, and the serial card you
use would need support as well.

I strongly advise you consider a linux boot disk for this purpose, which
frees you to use cheap and plentiful USB->serial adapters. If your
laptop has a bootable cdrom, you're practically home free.

If you've only got a floppy and you need to talk over the serial port,
you should be able to put together a boot disk with the necessary USB
drivers, busybox, and minicom.

If you need to run some small, obscure DOS utility to access the serial
port, you might be able to cram that on a linux boot floppy with dosemu
(e.g. into a compressed read-only volume that's loopback mounted)

Lots of gyrations, sure, but if you absolutely positively need to run a
dos program that accesses a serial port on a laptop that lacks one
natively, you can either pay for an unsupported solution or roll your
own. Personally, I'd consider buying an old $50 laptop that has a serial
port already. If you wanted to get fancy and small, you could pick up an
old HP 100LX or 200LX for a little more.

-Isaac


On Tue, 18 Jan 2005, David Vincelli wrote:

> On 17 Jan 2005 23:24:26 -0500, james <james at jdfogg.com> wrote:
> > Not unless pcmcia drivers are available for DOS. Of course, do you
> > really *have* DOS on your laptop? If you have XP instaled you don't
> > really have DOS and lots of DOS apps will break.
>
> I figure (about the drivers). Even if I did have XP on my laptop
> (hint: it's not running ms nor linux), DOS would only be a boot disk
> away.
>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> David Vincelli
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