CF Pagefiles

[Steve]

I'm near the end of developing a XPe solution. Today I
found out that XPe is unable to create a page file on
some CF drives. I've got a sick feeling in my stomach
seeing as how out of the three systems in our lab, I
happened to pick the one to develop on that had a 'good'
CF.

Looking through old posts there seemed to be some
speculation that this would be fixed in SP1 but it would
seem that it was not. Does anyone, especially the MS
folks, know what the status of pagefiles on CF is?

I have seen reference to being able to modify some CFs
such that the disk can be marked as nonremoveable. Anyone
have information on this?

Also, to head off questions - I can't add more memory and
use EWF. Additionally because of the way this product is
used we have not had a problem with the limitation on the
number of write cycles for CF.

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Hi Steve,

Just out of curiosity.
1. Why do you need page file support on CF? Because you need more memory or
because some functions do not behave as they should when you don't have page
file support.
2. No EWF? Have you considered power losses and possibility of data damage.
Or this is not an issue in your case.

Limitation on write cycles of CF is probably not something that you will see
in lab conditions.

Regards,
Slobodan

 

[Guest]

Morning Slobodan,

We need more memory. The controller we have is limited to
64MB. Currently we use NT4 on the controller. I did some
research initially to see what our failure rate of CFs
were. This controller has been in use for several years
now and we aren't experiencing significant numbers of
failures on them.

The reason we use CF versus an actual drive is that the
application of this controller experiences high shock &
vibration and traditional hard disk is quickly destroyed.

Power failures aren't an issue for us.

Honestly I wouldn't mind using EWF, I think it would be
good for the product. It's just we don't have the memory
for an overlay.

I'm certainly open to suggestions... on this CF issue or
possible alternative solutions.

Steve

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

CF has a limited count of write possible and this is a one of main reasons
why you should not use pagefile support on flash devices.

If you use minlogon build with custom shell and if you don't add unnecessary
services.
And move to unprotected partition or disable all logs on your protected
partition.

You should be able to lower your EWF memory usage to far below of 1 MB.

So even 64 MB of memory could be enough for majority of projects.

Regards,
Slobodan