I have utility to mark Microdrives as Fised IDE drives, is anyone interested?

[Paul]

If so please let me know. I will probably need to get an NDA, not sure on
this side yet, which is why I haven't put it up on the site.

However there is a driver to mark the IBM/Hitachi Microdrives as Fixed and I
am just about to test it. So if this something that people might want please
let me know and I will work on seeing if I can push it out.

Cheers

Paul Tyler
Athena USA
XPe and CE.NET Thin Clients
612-600-3782
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Hi Paul,

I have made similar driver two months ago that can mask any removable
device. But I can't describe solution because of NDA

It took me half a normal working day to make this driver and XPe component.
So figure out how difficult is this.

Regards,
Slobodan

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[Paul]

It seems my friends at IBM have given me the inf so that the drive would be
supported by the O/S, which was needed in the O/S before 2000 and XP.
However as the drive is already seen by XPe, this doesn't really help.

Sorry, will continue bugging them.

 

[Paul]

Hello Slobodan

Hmm, unfortunately making drivers is way beyond my capabilities, and of
course my friends at IBM, gave me the wrong bloody thing. So back to the
drawing board for me unfortunately.

Cheers!

Paul

 

[Chris Jones]

Hmm

I'm confused, there is an issue in using a microdrive with XPe?
I've got a 340Mb Microdrive thats probably about 4 years old now which I've
had no problems at all getting XPe booting from.
I'm sure I just fdisk'ed it initially in my Compact Flash -> IDE convertor
and never thought about it, are you saying that if I bought another one it
would be more difficult?
This drive has run Linux and Windows 98SE on it in it's lifetime so perhaps
something I've done previoulsy has made my life easy, I'd never given it a
second thought.
The XPe image is copied to it either using my DOS nicboot usbkey (so I can
just copy across the LAN) or by sticking it into a memorex CF reader on the
XPe dev machine.
In actual fact, thinking about it, I'm sure I used the disk partition tools
in XPP to partition and activate the drive whilst in the USB reader.

Let me know if you really get stuck as I'm sure if I ghost it as a blank
drive (ie. no XPe image on it) then you can just ghost it back using Ghost8
(Win32) with it connected to a USB reader and it'll be partitioned and
active as you require.

Unless I'm totally missing the point?

Regards
Chris

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Hi Chris,

XPe can work on removable devices but you can have only one partition.

In order for XPe to support more than one partition your disk must be seen
as fixed.

Regards,
Slobodan

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[Ferenc Sarkozy]

Helo Slobodan,

We got programs from Sandisk under NDA to mark CF cards as
unremovable, but now we have a card which is incompatible with them
and Sandisk doesn't reply ...

I would like to ask you wheteher do you now a CF card manufacturer
which provides these programs, or supply their cards as nonremovable.

Or ... I am interested in any other solution you can suggest

Thank you and best regards:
Ferenc Sarkozy

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Hi Ferenc,

There are few models of Sandisk's CF and tools are made for certain models, so you will have somehow to reach Sandisk's support this
is the best way for you.
Also you can find and buy or order CF marked as fixed at factory. (Although not in my country).

With drivers I can't help you, because of reasons I mentioned in previous post.

Regards,
Slobodan