I was restoring a bunch of Compaq Portable III machines and due to the awful Conner hard drives, most of them had nothing to boot from.

So I made a bunch of these and have a couple left over to sell.

This listing is for ONE hard drive replacement bay, comprising of:

1) Custom drive mount which fits perfectly inside the Compaq portable III to replace the hard drive cover

2) IDE to CF card adaptor mounted in the centre.

3) One Pretec industrial compact flash card. When configured as a Type 04 hard drive in the BIOS, this will boot to MS-DOS 6.22 and has a bunch of software installed - games and stuff to play with.

A type 04 drive is about 71Mb, so for this era of machine has plenty of space - and you can just remove the card with the machine off, copy over anything you like, slot it back in and use it - without having to take the cover off.

This looks totally stock. It’s a brilliant, OEM-looking modern solution to those awful Conner drives.

I’ll add one Caveat - the configuration for the Compaq Portable III is done via a boot floppy disk - if you don’t have a working floppy drive and setup disk, then you have other problems.

Buying and using this conversation kit assumes you have a machine that boots into your own setup disk and you will need to remove the rear cover, slide out and switch the hard drive, remove the brown plastic side panel covering the internal HDD and add a molex adaptor which will change the HDD connector to a FDD type.

To be clear - this auction does not include a Compaq computer. It does not include anything other than the plastic mount, the IDE-CF adaptor and the 1Gb compact flash card.

It took weeks to make this. And the bits cost a fair bit to make.