We have a piece of equipment at work that has a Sharp 486 laptop in a docking station.  This is the only computer that will work on the machine.  The equipment still works fine, we have 3 more of these laptops in case it dies.  The SOFTWARE for the machine is DOS based.  We keep using this because a new machine with windows cost about 20,000.00 and this still does a good job.  
 
The problem is the data on this machine backs up to a FD.  We can put about 10 files on a disk and have close to 4000 files backed up.  I would like to but a CF CARD adapter in it.  This would allow me to transfer over the disk to the CF card and use the CF card in the future for the back ups.  I have a SanDisk CF PC card adapter at home.

How would I set this up so DOS would use this as a drive in my program when I back up files.  Where would I find a DOS driver that I can put on an FD to load.  

Any help would be greatly apprecitated.  I am tired of all the floppies in the desk.  

BobYou might be able to get a driver CF from Sandisk. Another alternative would be to get a zip drive. A parallel port zip 100 will work with a 486 and DOS 6.0 or higher.I tried the zip drive but it would not work.  Was told that since the laptop was in a docking station it some how screwed up the zip drives ability to work.  The program that runs the piece of equipment will not start up unless it is in the docking station and can read the equipment.   I could not find a driver on SanDisk.  I am more than willing to get one from another company if it would work better.

I presume you have two drives: A and C. You have two questions

1) How can I modify a system to backup to a drive other than A?

2) How can I establish another drive?

In other words you would like to purchase or connect some DEVICE and CALL it your E-drive.

You would then like to have your backups go to E rather than A.

Well, with regard to 1, I am surprised if you have a program that is HARD coded to use A. It may be you can find a BAT file with
Backup A
which you can change to
Backup E
(assuming you solved problem 2)

If it is hard coded, let me know and I will try to remember how I once dropped my A-drive and redefined some other device to be A.

Mac
I do not know if it is hard coded.  I just need to know how to make a cf card  a drive under CMOS.  I assume once this is done it will be useable under the program.   I have over 400 FDs to deal with and growing every week.  If you have an idea on how to do this I would like to hear it.  Hopefully this is a basic fix.  

thanksIt doesn't have much (if anything) to do with the CMOS.  Your main issue is that you need real-mode DOS drivers for your SanDisk CF PC-Card.  If you can't find drivers, then maybe drivers for a similar product will work (maybe Lexar or another company has a DOS driver for their CF card reader?).  Once you have the driver, you need the syntax to load it, which will probably be in the CONFIG.SYS file.  And you may need a PC Card Services driver from Sharp loaded before you can load your CF driver.