Final pictures are here.
2 of the common problems for this computer were the keyboard cable disintegration and floppy drive failure.
The insulation around the keyboard cable literally disintegrated. Moving the cable makes pieces fall off. There's no way that I know of to replace the insulation, so the cable needed to be replaced.
The keyboard connector is standard. But the problem is that a standard keyboard plug is too wide to fit into the hole. I had to look around for a cable with a "thin" connector so that it would fit. I ended up getting a keyboard extension cable and cutting off the plug end. It was then a matter of pinning out the cables (old and replacement) to see what wires go where. Overall, about 30 minutes of work to replace the cable.
The 1/3 height 5.25" didn't work. I decided it wasn't worthwhile to fix it and went straight to the Gotek. This made getting boot media much easier.
The device I bought was something someone created on eBay. It combines a Gotek (already set up with FlashFloppy) with a CF-IDE adapter in one half-height 5.25" 3D printed tray. It fit where the hard drive used to be. I only had to make a slight case modification for the CF card.
The hard drive set up was interesting. I have to choose a hard drive type that the Compaq supports. If I chose the 110 MB one (which Compaq had a real hard drive for), everything worked. But if I chose a larger one (like the 320 MB), I get a 1790 drive 0 error - but after hitting F1 gets me into DOS.
One more interesting thing. You can't "not select" a floppy in the Gotek. So you have to have the USB drive out to boot from the hard drive. Otherwise it tries to boot from the floppy chosen in the Gotek. I did have an idea to make a switch and wire it into the Gotek power, but the only thing I need the Gotek for is loading diskette images, so I didn't see the value. And it causes no problems to insert the USB drive after you've booted up.
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