I had to do questionable things to make a power adapter since this machine used a non-standard power connector for the hard drive. I scoured my inventory and found a 200MB IDE 2.5' hard drive that the machine was ok with. Unfortunately, the machine would not POST if a CF/IDE adapter or any more modern IDE HDD were connected. I also replaced the hard drive as the original Conner CP-3044 was clearly beginning to fail. Then I don't have to do any risky dremel work on the RTC. This means I only have to boot from floppy, eject the floppy and reboot, and it will then boot fine from hard drive until next time I shut down the power and it gets amnesia again. Then another tool to write those 64 bytes back to the CMOS, placed on a boot disk and set up in AUTOEXEC.BAT to update the CMOS on boot. It turned out to be quite simple to make a Turbo C++ program to download those 64 bytes to a file after using the Compaq tool to update the configuration.
I have not done the Dallas RTC battery modification yet as I have been able to work around the dead battery.
