Tecra 780 Laptop Hard Drive questions

[Princeman]

I recently picked up a Toshiba Tecra (P2 266) 780dvd dirt cheap on ebags. It's got no floppy, no cd-rom, no hard drive and no caddy but has 2 pcmcia card slots and two usb ports and posts fine. Do I need to get the exact caddy and hard drive for my laptop to add a hard drive? The HDD that originally came with it said 5.1 or 8.1 gig and 17mm height. Does height matter? This caddy doesn't seen very available btw. Can I put in a PCMCIA firewire adapter card in the card slot and attach an external firewire drive to boot from? Can I hook a flash memory card up to the usb port with a card reader and boot from that? Any other ways to install a HDD? Would like it to be portable when I'm finished if possible. Thanks!

 

[LiLithTecH]

Floppy drives and caddies are abundant on Ebay.

He's a reasonablely priced one:

Tecra 700 series floppy & caddy

Tecra 8000 floppy drive and caddy work also (but do not match color wise).

You can replace the Hard drive with anything up to a 20 gig.
(may require a BIOS update if not done already)

Drive height does matter but generally Hitachi, IBM, Toshiba, Fujitsu drives work.

No, you cannot boot off the PCMCIA Firewire card as the BIOS does not support.
Same with the USB Flash card.