Hmm.. I`ve got two Panasonic Toughbook CF-M34 MK1, which is 15+ years old. And.. first thing I have noticed, that the BIOS only supports booting from A: or C:. - Which means, does not work for ArcaOS without cheating, as AcraOS prefers to be installed from either USB or optical drives. So, cheating required in my case..
And cheat I will! Big time and as nerdy as I can: I have already prepared a VM with ArcaOS and hard drive and RAM size as it is buit in the notebook. Also HDD type is IDE in my case. Then I`ve created a disk image with Norton Ghost, and told it to split images into 80 MB pieces. (Done that today.)
Tomorrow I will copy these image pieces to Iomega ZIP100 disks via IDE_ZIP100. Then attaching the Toughbook to it`s docking station (since that one comes with LPT support) Then booting Norton Ghost from floppy on the Toughbook and with the help of an Iomega ZIP100_LPT I will then restore the images onto the Toughbook CF-M34 MK1. So far the plan..
In theory this should work and boot up, as Norton Ghost should be able to reproduce JFS and the boot sector in THE way OS/2 prefers.
After this, it`s all about testing hardware compatibility.
When I have more test data I`ll report more.
In your case, this might look totally different. I know, however, that PCMCIA and general Notebook support is not specially mentioned for any Panasonic notebook model. So.. just try and find out, IF that machine can boot from USB or CD/DVD.