FAT32 compact flash boot drive

[Guest]

Hello, all. I've got a problem getting my XPe image to run on a FAT32 CF
drive. When I download the image to _the same CF card_ when it is formatted
as an NTFS drive, it boots fine and FBA runs and all is happy. When I change
the CF card to FAT32, I get "disk error, press any key to restart" during
boot right after the BIOS info appears on the screen.

Perusing the documentation, it says that you can use FAT32 on a CF drive. It
also says you don't need to run bootprep since it is FAT32, not FAT16. Just
for grins, I ran bootprep on my CF card, and that made it even worse (boot
just completely hung without even the "disk error" message appearing).

I'd like to use FAT32 instead of NTFS in order to reduce write-cycles on the
CF drive. Paging is already turned off.

Any ideas on what I'm missing. As I said, when it's NTFS all is kosher;
FAT32, no happiness.

This is XPe with SP2 and the QFE rollup from Feb 2007. To get an idea of all
the included components I have, the macros used in Target Designer include
(and I've selected all the elements from each macro):
devices generated from tap.exe
Server Printing Support
TCP/IP Networking with Client For MS Networks (yeah, I know it's
redundant but I haven't removed it yet)
TCP/IP Networking with File Sharing and Client For MS Networks
Terminal Services
Windows XP Explorer User Interface
WinLogon Sample Macro (all elements except Standard PC - it's an ACPI PC)

Thanks,
Judy

 

[Guest]

Forgot to mention - no EWF since there is no other drive in the system and
data must be maintained across boots.

 

[KM]

Judy,

A quick question - how did you partition and format your CF to FAT32?
Did you do that on the target device or not?

 

[Guest]

I have XP Pro loaded on a hard drive that I connected to the target device
and booted from. I used the standard format in XP to format the CF, both when
I formatted it as FAT32 and as NTFS.

 

[Stuart Langley]

Sounds like simple MBR problem to be.

I have always found it easier to use a WIN98 boot floppy/USB stick and a
tool like aefdisk (or even fdisk/format) to prepare a CF for booting to
FAT16/32 partitions. There are plenty of disk image sites on the net if you
do not have a PC lying around running WIN98 to create a boot disk from.

Regards,

Stuart

 

[KM]

I should actually ask you more specific question. How exactly you formatted it in FAT32? What command(s) did you use?

Did you repartition the disk? (you didn't need to but you could) If you did, try fixing the MBR (e.g., using MbrFix tool -
http://www.sysint.no/en/Download.aspx).

--
=========
Regards,
KM

I have XP Pro loaded on a hard drive that I connected to the target device
and booted from. I used the standard format in XP to format the CF, both when
I formatted it as FAT32 and as NTFS.

 

[Guest]

Stuart and KM,

I agree that it's an MBR problem but I haven't been able to fix it. I've
partitioned using fdisk and formatted from a FreeDOS boot, formatted from XP
Pro (both the UI format that appears on the context menu and format from the
command prompt), formatted from a BartPE boot, and partitioned and formatted
from the tools on the UtlimateBootCD.

Unfortunately, I don't have access to a Win98 system to try Stuart's
suggestion. I'll try the MbrFix tool that KM suggested and report my results.

 

[Guest]

No joy. I used MbrFix while booted under Windows XP off my regular hard drive
- my CF appears as my D drive when booted this way. The "listpartitions"
MbrFix command shows:

# Boot Size (MB) Type
1 Yes 3917 11 WIN95 OSR2 32-bit FAT
2 0 0 None
3 0 0 None
4 0 0 None

Since XP thinks the CF is removable, I can't get any output from diskpart.

More details: the CF card is a SanDisk 4.0GB CompactFlash. Just a plain
ordinary one, not an Ultra or Extreme. The target is an Advantech PCM-3380
single board computer (Pentium-based Intel chipset, CF Type 1 slot on the
secondary IDE controller)

 

[Guest]

Even more data - if i take the CF card that didn't boot after running MbrFix,
run convert under XP to change to NTFS and then boot from the CF, it works
perfectly.

Steps:

CF NTFS boots and runs

boot under XP with CF as non-boot drive
use UI format to reformat CF (d as FAT32
copy all XPe image files to d:

boot from CF - "disk error"

boot under XP with CF as non-boot drive
MbrFix /drive 1 fixmbr

boot from CF - "disk error"

boot under XP with CF as non-boot drive
convert d: /fs:ntfs

boot from CF - FBA is running as we speak

 

[Mike Warren]

boot from CF - FBA is running as we speak

It's generally not a good idea to run FBA on a flash disk as it
decreases the life of the flash. What most people do is perform FBA on
a hard drive and copy finished image to the flash drives.

For the same reason it is better to disable the page file and switch
off any logging if you are not using EWF.

 

[Guest]

I know this one CF is getting the crap beat out of it. This is my
"development" CF. Once FBA is done and the system is set as I want, I'll
ghost the CF drive and copy it onto the production CF drives that will be put
in the user's systems. The drive cabling options are very limited with the
target system I'm running and I'm trying to avoid destroying another IDE
cable (2 have already bitten the dust) with all the plugging and unplugging
as I switch drives around. Replacing a CF card is easier than getting these
cables from the manufacturer.

As I said earlier, paging is disabled in the image and no system / event
logging is active.

Hmmmm, just had the thought. I wonder if I can get a regular hard drive to
boot with FAT32. If I can do that, I can ghost the image and put it on the
CF. That should copy the MBR and anything else in the bowels of the disk
partition. Off I go...

Judy

 

[stbuhk]

I know this one CF is getting the crap beat out of it. This is my
"development" CF. Once FBA is done and the system is set as I want, I'll
ghost the CF drive and copy it onto the production CF drives that will be put
in the user's systems. The drive cabling options are very limited with the
target system I'm running and I'm trying to avoid destroying another IDE
cable (2 have already bitten the dust) with all the plugging and unplugging
as I switch drives around. Replacing a CF card is easier than getting these
cables from the manufacturer.

As I said earlier, paging is disabled in the image and no system / event
logging is active.

Hmmmm, just had the thought. I wonder if I can get a regular hard drive to
boot with FAT32. If I can do that, I can ghost the image and put it on the
CF. That should copy the MBR and anything else in the bowels of the disk
partition. Off I go...

Judy

JudyL wrote:

It's generally not a good idea to run FBA on a flash disk as it
decreases the life of the flash. What most people do is perform FBA on
a hard drive and copy finished image to the flash drives.

For the same reason it is better to disable the page file and switch
off any logging if you are not using EWF.

I would confirm it will run FBA on an IDE drive with FAT32, if that
runs fine then image to the CF.

 

[Guest]

Success, relatively. I'm able to build the image on a regular FAT32 hard
drive, then ghost it to a CF. The CF then boots into XPe without a problem.
I'm still not happy about the hard drive switching I'll have to do (theses
cables die easily as they get pulled on and off), but it's a wark-around to
the original problem.

Judy

 

[KM]

Judy,

From your report I can only think of one thing. Is your card marked as fixed or removable?

From what you wrote below it sounded it is still removable. Then some behavior (e.g., FAT32 boot) could be unpredictable.

 

[Guest]

I believe removable - it has never been "not removable" in all the different
ways I've booted it. I've made all the selections / settings / config options
I could find on the web that talk about different ways to make it fixed and
none of them made a difference. SanDisk doesn't make any tools to modify
their CF drives, so I'm stuck with how it is.

I have found a workaround (see above) that solves the end problem of getting
a FAT32 CF to use in our production systems, but it's not ideal since it
requires drive swapping on the target machine. It seems like FBA just doesn't
want to run on a removable FAT32 CF.

I'm willing to keep trying ideas but I'm not hopeful one will be found.

Thanks for your help KM, and you as well Stuart,
Judy

 

[Tom Zambetis]

I believe removable - it has never been "not removable" in all the different
ways I've booted it. I've made all the selections / settings / config options
I could find on the web that talk about different ways to make it fixed and
none of them made a difference. SanDisk doesn't make any tools to modify
their CF drives, so I'm stuck with how it is.

I have found a workaround (see above) that solves the end problem of getting
a FAT32 CF to use in our production systems, but it's not ideal since it
requires drive swapping on the target machine. It seems like FBA just doesn't
want to run on a removable FAT32 CF.

I'm willing to keep trying ideas but I'm not hopeful one will be found.

We use SanDisk CF cards for prototyping because they are cheap and
readily available. We have the utility from SanDisk which changes
their attribute from removable to fixed. I format them as NTFS and run
FBA on them all the time, as our product device cannot connect to a
HDD. CF cards so identified are able to be partitioned and formatted
using the Windows Disk Management applet, and also by the third-party
utility program Partition Magic.

So SanDisk did provide this utility at some point in the past. When I
joined the XPe project about a year ago, the utility was alread
present. I don't know who got it or how they did it.

TAZ

 

[Stuart Langley]

SanDisk utility was available via NDA. So therefore it should not be
floating around anywhere but needs to be acquired from SanDisk directly.
Further to this from memory SanDisk was/is getting out of the industrial
flash business so have discontinued distribution of this utility via NDA or
any other method.

Regards,

Stuart

 

[Stuart Langley]

Hi Judy,

Firstly there aren't any selections / settings / config options to change
the removable/fixed disk setting without using a manufacturer specific
utility to modify the cards firmware.

Secondly, I have been able to get the FBA process to run on a removable CF
without problems, provided I have not attempted to distribute the image over
more than one partition. The removable/fixed issue does not arise until
windows itself is up and running, and from memory your issue is at boot
time.

Regards,

Stuart

 

[Stuart Langley]

Although this is the conventional wisdom, I've got a collection of CF cards
here I have beenn builtind test systems on. At at guess each one would have
had say 200+ FBA runs each, and all still run without missing a beat. How
big the internal free sectors remaining list used for replacing damaged
sectors is I don't know, but they seem to last a lot longer than most people
think.

Regards,

Stuart

 

[Guest]

You remember correctly - the problem is, after loading the image on the card,
it won't boot and run FBA. The thing I find interesting is that it is only on
FAT32 CF cards. I can take the non-booting FAT32 card, convert it to NTFS,
and it boots and runs FBA just fine. It's only that first FBA boot that won't
work. If I build the image on a "regular" FAT32 (which works ok) then ghost
that image to the CF card, the CF card will boot XPe correctly. Removable
FAT32 is the problem, apparently.

Judy