Booting Old Thinkpads From Compact Flash/PCMCIA

A very old post on a forum made me question how capable older Thinkpads were when booting from PCMCIA Compact Flash adaptors.

Sometimes it can be useful to boot from PCMCIA Compact Flash, particularly if the machine's IDE hard drive is not accessible or functioning.

As with many aspects of Retro computing, when you begin this simple binary test, the whole endeavour becomes instantly more complex as mission creep takes hold. Is the machine bootable from a PCMCIA CF Card Adaptor is a good starting point, but then the obvious next step is 'what is bootable?' because some operating systems may work and others not. 

There is the question of whether an OS is installable to the PCMCIA Compact Flash card - some have found to work, others crash midway.

Then with some machines, some or all of the above will work but only under certain conditions (removing or disabling certain other boot devices).

Finally, some machines do support PCMCIA Compact Flash cards as bootable devices, but only up to a certain size limit.

Also, I try to keep this table up-to-date as well.