compact flash prep

[Dan Rogers]

I have rack-mounted machines with Silicon Systems industrial Compact Flash
installed. I want to prep the CF for boot from an XPe system running on the
same board, i.e. the system running when I do the prep will have been loaded
from a boot server. The motivation is that the CF cannot easily be removed.
Assume I have diskpart and udfprep installed. With diskpart I can "select
disk 0" and see the flash as an IDE drive since it's "fixed" bit is set. I
cannot select a volume or partition. What commands can I script with
diskpart and/or udfprep to prepare the CF device with a FAT32 file system?

 

[Sean Liming \(MVP\)]

Diskpart should be able to partition the internal CF. The format.exe utility
is need to format the partition. UFDprep only works when the CF is in a USB
to CF adapter.

If the system supports booting from USB, you could build an XPe image that
boots from a USB flash disk with the DiskManager, diskpart, and format, that
can perform all the basic tasks.

--
Regards,

Sean Liming
www.sjjmicro.com / www.seanliming.com
Book Author - XP Embedded Advanced, XP Embedded Supplemental Toolkit

 

[Sean Liming \(MVP\)]

Diskpart should be able to partition the internal CF. The format.exe utility
is need to format the partition. UFDprep only works when the CF is in a USB
to CF adapter.

If the system supports booting from USB, you could build an XPe image that
boots from a USB flash disk with the DiskManager, diskpart, and format, that
can perform all the basic tasks.

--
Regards,

Sean Liming
www.sjjmicro.com / www.seanliming.com
Book Author - XP Embedded Advanced, XP Embedded Supplemental Toolkit

 

[David Jones vpac org>]

I notice a related "quirk" today:

Have machine grade CFs.
- Can partition into two and mark first as active in IDE-CF adapter .. ie
Fixed.
- I then shutdown.
- If I reboot (leaving CF in place) and then format the OS partition, then
copy the OS to it, then FBA runs OK , upon reboot.
- If though I put the CF into a PCMCIA-CF adapter and format there, and copy
image to it; then place it back into the IDE-CF (after shutdown) .. FBA fails
after reboot
?????????????????????????????????

--
David Jones
Software Developer
(Embeddded Systems)
Victorian Partnership of Advanced Computing
Melbourne, Victoria Australia