I bought a 1GB AGFA Photo high-speed compact flash card and it arrived so I was able to try it out. Firstly I plugged it into my PowerBook 1400 using a Sandisk PC Card compact flash adaptor and the card appeared on the desktop. I formatted it using "Drive Setup" version 1.7.3 as a standard Mac OS volume then preceded to copy everything on my 1400's internal hard drive onto the compact flash card (some 400MB or so of data). Then I used the "Startup Disk" control panel to select the flash card as the boot volume and re-started. First thing that happened is the PowerBook spat the card out as it shut down so I quickly re-inserted it before the PowerBook fully lit up. It was successful - it booted up from the card straight away! The startup time was good and I would say it is on a par with the hard drive, if not slightly faster. The AGFA card is an 80x model meaning that it is quite a bit faster than standard compact flash cards.

Next thing was to remove the internal hard drive to prevent it from making a noise (it spins up on power-on by default). This was incredibly easy - the 1400's keyboard lifts up and the drive appembly can be removed by undoing two small screws and unplugging the drive. Voila - silent PowerBook 1400!

The only slight issue is the card being ejected on shutdown, however, given that my 1400 is nearly always in "sleep mode" when not in use it won't be a problem. I may try the install from an OS 8.1 retail CD, as suggested, to overcome this issue.

I have uploaded a

of the 1400 booting from the card.
Oh, just an extra note, my PowerBook 1400 is running System 7.6.1. I haven't tried this setup with other Mac OS versions yet but it will make a good future project.