EWF Disk Overlay Meaningless for CF card?

[Huang Sheng-Chi]

Could someone who is using EWF disk overlay and CF card
confirm with me if this is correct or not? Thank you.

Since CF cards have a limited number of writes and since
WXPe always perform system writes (i.e. log and registry
files ), then EWF Disk Overlay is meaningless? Why would
one want all the writes to the EWF disk overlay in the CF
card if this will reduce the number of writes to the CF
card? RAM overlay seems like the best solution, and if
one needs to write to the CF card, then they can just use
the "-commit" and reboot the system. However, RAM Overlay
still writes to the CF card (32K minimum size for system
commands). Is there no way to do NO WRITES at all to the
CF card?

 

[Sean Liming \(eMVP\)]

Huang,

Some one from MS may correct me on this, but the 32K space is used for
controlling EWF. The only time you access the 32K space is with EWFGR or the
EWF APIs. In a RAM overlay, all rights are made to RAM.

You could have a disk overlay with CF if you have a hard disk in the system
holding the EWF partition. Of course this goes against the idea of using the
CF card.

Regards,

Sean Liming
www.a7eng.com
Author: Windows NT Embedded Step-By-Step and XP Embedded Advanced.

 

[Huang Sheng-Chi]

Hi Sean,
Thanks for the response. I think you are right about the
32K. So if we don't use the ewfmgr, then there should be
no writes to the CF card. For us, this is the only
solution we have for our system: RAM Overlay, and using
ewfmgr -commit when we need to make changes to the system
(i.e. registries).

Is everyone out there doing the same thing?