Help Please: New to XP Embedded

[Guest]

Our company is now looking into XP Embedded solutions and I have been
assigned the task of researching deployment options. I am completely new to
Embedded development and would greatly appreciate if you could answer a few
questions that I have or if you could point me in the right direction to find
some additional information. I have done quite a bit of searching and reading
over the last few days but cannot find the answers to these questions.

1) Can XP Embedded be deployed on a system without a hard drive; running
completely from a PCI card?
* I've done some reading and this and it seems that this can only be done
using CE.NET, not XP Embedded. Is this correct?

2) How would you scan or run the ta.exe/tap.exe utilities for an external
PC? How is could you connect third party hardware to your development PC and
scan them to build the required image? I done some reading and have also
watched some tutorials, but they only discuss building an image for you own
PC. If it's a matter of adding the components from the Components (10,000
items) database, how can anyone find the correct component? Motherboard,
memory, hard drives, PCI cards, etc...

Thank you and I appreciate your time.

Sincerely,
Mark

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Hi Mark,

If you have network then you can boot from network and do all analysis from image that is stored in your RAM.

A1) If you can make your custom boot loader that will fill memory with XPe image then you can do custom boot from RAM.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnxpesp1/html/ram_sdi.asp

A2) TA,TAP are not necessary to build your image. I do not use them since they are only helper tools and not actually required to
build image from scratch. It is just a matter of knowing your hardware well enough and adding appropriate components by your self.
Or you can use standard MS drivers that will cover all hardware with universal drivers.
Look at "Minlogon macro" components to get an idea what components you might need.

If it's a matter of adding the components from the Components (10,000
items) database, how can anyone find the correct component? Motherboard,
memory, hard drives, PCI cards, etc...

First motherboard is not a atomic unit but rather it is composed of functional units that you should know. For each unit you can
find generic component or some component that contain drivers that do better description of that particular hardware.
Each hardware component is described by its VID, PID numbers and some sub numbers that describe this device uniquely. Also there are
compatible IDs that describe to what generic class that hardware belong.

By simple search trough inf files you can find the best inf file that describe certain VID, PID, then you can search in TD for that
file by using filter option.

Sorry for cryptic answers but I would need few more pages just to tackle in to the subject. But it is simple when you figure it out.

Just ask if you need more info.

Regards,
Slobodan