Lets go back to the very beginning...
You got... A CF in a PCMCIA adapter that crashed a 3400 and gives problems on a 5300? It gave a Sad Mac on the 3400 and then bars on boot when rebooted?
Sounds like a dying 3400. Check the ram cards and CPU Card on the 3400 and make sure things are tight with them. Same on the 5300 (RAM Cards as there is no CPU card on the 5300). Lets try to get these two machines to boot with the hard drive and make sure there are no problems when booting. If you did a PCMCIA to Cardbus mod to either machine, undo it and get rid of it. This is only for PCMCIA ONLY!
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Put them to the side, you got another laptop to work with that has PCMCIA Slots? I think a Windows laptop was mentioned. Lets use it for a second. Turn it on and let it boot to Windows/Linux/What ever you have. Once you have the desktop and the had drive stops, put in the PCMCIA with the CF in it. It may complain about needing drivers, which a standard set of drivers is on the Windows Install CD. Once the drivers are installed, turn on FDisk, PartitionMagic, GPart (there's a version for windows), etc. to look at and create partitions on the CF Card.
Select the drive number (usually between 2 to 5 most of the time it is 2), as a letter is not defined. When the drive is selected, examine the Partition Information on the drive. Note them down. Then Delete THEM ALL! Quite the program and Reboot the system. This should delete the partition information on the drive.
Once rebooted, turn on the partitioning software you were using. Like before select the drive number of the CF Card. Partition it in 2GB Slices! If you have a 16GB CF Card, make 8 - 2GB partition slices! Assign each slice a letter ID! Make the first slice as "Active." In the case of FDisk - this might not be possible but its OK. Quit the program and reboot the system.
Once rebooted again, go to "My Computer" icon. Each slice will come up but they are not formatted. Format each slice. Shut down and reboot. At this point the CF should be usable.
NOTE: Under Windows, you need to reboot each time you make changes to the partition table of any drive. Under Linux you do not need to reboot.
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NOW (!!!) you got a CF Card partitioned and formatted for DOS/Windows. Get a Mac, lets use the 5300. You will need on it:
A minimum of System 7.5.5
PC Exchange and its drivers
HD SetUp
PC Exchange will allow the Mac to read PC DOS/Windows formatted disks.
Turn on the Mac 5300. Once on Desktop, put in the CF Card in the PCMCIA slot. The Mac will complain about being a PC Formatted device, just answer Yes or OK to the questions it asks. Then a drive icon will pop up for each slice you created.
Now you should be able to format each slice into Mac OS. If you cant, you will need to open HD SetUp and repartition the slices into Mac OS slices, each one 2GB each. And then you can format each slice. (Note: When I did this I did not had to reboot the Mac 5300, but I was using System 7.6.1)
With each slice converted to a Mac Slice, you should be able to use it on the 3400 and the 5300. And out of these slices, you should be able to put a system on one or more of the slices and boot it from the PCMCIA - but after you have the system folder blessed!
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Notes:
- This is for HSF Mac OS Format. If you want HSF+, make sure you have OS 8.1 not OS8. HSF+ Will not work under System 7 or OS8, it will only work for OS8.1 (Some people have gotten HSF+ to work on OS8, but I find it too flakey on OS8 to be reliable.)
- Work with 2GB Slices and make sure that they work under HSF+ first before changing them into 4GB Slices.
- Before you put a system on the CF drive, make sure you can copy files and access those files fro the CF Drive. If you can - delete the files and then put in the System.