HELP : howto boot XPe in FAT on CompactFlash

[Guillaume]

Hello

I need help about booting XPe


In my company, manufacturing is using industrial PCs with
XPe on Compact Flash. this was installed by another
company, and we (IT team) are not aware about this

Yesterday, a CF had an issue and all the production had
to stop.

Production staff called us, but we just discovered that
we had XPe in the company!

The production guy have made a copy (xcopy) of the CF on
a file server.


So all I have now is a new CF and all the files from the
genuine CF.


So I tried to copy back all to files on the new CF, but
it's never booting !


After searching on the Web, I find articles about
bootprep, EWF...

XPe seems to be a bit different !


I tried to format FAT with XP or DOS, using bootprep or
not, the best result was booting on DOS after a "SYS
G:" (G: is my CF). At least I know the PC can boot on
this CF !


How can do to make this new CF bootable with XPe. I don't
have any XPe SDK, the only tool I have is bootprep.exe.


Thanks very much for your help, and sorry for my poor
english

Guillaume

 

[Greg Martin]

Hello,

What is the problem with the original compact flash?

Do you still have the compact flash that was working on the device? If
not, do you have another in production that you can remove?

I have a utility that will image a complete compact flash card,
including paritions, formatting, EWF, etc.

If you think this can help, I'll email it to you.

If the first card is corrupt, then you probably should get original
company that created the device for you to replace the card for you.

Regards,

Greg Martin.
Inspired Systems

 

[guillaume]

Thanks very much for your quick answer,

The original CF is unreadable. But I'll get a new CF from
the company who sold us the device.


I'll send you a mail to give you my email address to send
me your tool.


For my personnal information, Is it possible to create
myself a XPe bootable CF without XPe SDK ?

Thanks again

Guillaume

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

For my personnal information, Is it possible to create

myself a XPe bootable CF without XPe SDK ?

Yes. But if there are disk geometry problems it can be tricky.

Your best bet would be to download XPe eval version from MS. And use bootprep tool from plain old dos on target device.

So steps would be.
1. Boot from diskette in dos.
2. use fdisk to partition set active one partition.
3. use format to format it in FAT.
4. use bootprep to make if XP/XPe bootable.

Or if you can and you have luck.
Please make sure that order of this steps is as I write it.
1. Connect CF to target device. (You must have XP that will boot on that device from HDD).
2. Boot XP.
3. Use Disk Manager to place FAT or NTFS, and it will be bootable.

Best regards,
Slobodan

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your reply,

So steps would be.
1. Boot from diskette in dos.
2. use fdisk to partition set active one partition.
3. use format to format it in FAT.
4. use bootprep to make if XP/XPe bootable.

Step 2 was missing in what I've done. But under DOS,
fdisk was unable to see any CF disk.

Is there some drivers for DOS to allow FDISK to see USB
Keys or CF Cards ?

Do you make any difference between DOS and DosConsole
under W98 ? because under W98, I can see the CF, so I've
done a bootprep, but this seems to be no enough.

Thanks and regards,

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

BIOS should see your CF, and USB devices.

Make sure that they are marked as fixed instead of removable.
Also use IDE CF adapter.

Best regards,
Slobodan

 

[Simon Wilton]

This utility sounds like it would be of use to a lot of people. Have you
considered putting it of xpefiles.com?

S

 

[Sanders]

Hello Greg,

At the moment I am also trying to make a bootable CF.
I would not only want to run XPe but also like to have a version o
CE.Net as embedded OS. For both the Windows versions I have copies o
the files.
If possible could I start with using the application you are referin
to?

R,
Sanders

*Hello,

What is the problem with the original compact flash?

Do you still have the compact flash that was working on the device
If
not, do you have another in production that you can remove?

I have a utility that will image a complete compact flash card,
including paritions, formatting, EWF, etc.

If you think this can help, I'll email it to you.

If the first card is corrupt, then you probably should get original
company that created the device for you to replace the card for you.

Regards,

Greg Martin.
Inspired Systems

-
Sander

 

[James Beau Cseri]

Do you know if the XPe image has the System Cloning Component built in?
Before copying the CF, you might want to boot to the original XPe CF, copy
fbreseal.exe from the repository to \Windows\system32 on the CF, and then
run fbreseal.exe just before shutting down. This process might need to
involve disabling EWF to run fbreseal.exe and then re-enabling it.