Hitachi Microdrive 3K4 digital media as a Fixed HDD

[Dave Hudder]

Hello,

Is anyone aware of a utility to make the Hitachi / IBM 2 GB and 4 GB
MicroDrives appear as fixed meia instead of removeable?

TIA,
Dave Hudder

 

[Guest]

Dave,

I got the MicroDrives driver from Hitachi. I can send you the driver if I
know you email or you can contact Hitachi directly.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the quick reply. Could you please post the URL for the driver to
this forum?

Thanks again
Dave Hudder

 

[Guest]

Since my last reply I have sat on hold with Hitachi tech support for a half
hour to be told they have no such utility. If you have a means of marking
the CF MicroDrive as "Fixed", please send it to me. My email address is:
(e-mail address removed) (without the .nospam)

Thank you!
Dave Hudder

 

[Guest]

I am also very interested in this capability. I similarly contacted Hitachi
tech support and their response was similarly, that no such utility exists.

(I will post this request in another response to YG's reply)
YG, could you also please send me the appropriate information. My email is:
(e-mail address removed)

Thank you in advance,
Joe

 

[Guest]

I am also very interested in this capability. I contacted Hitachi tech
support and their response was that no such utility exists.

Could you also please send me the appropriate information. My email is:
(e-mail address removed)

Thank you in advance,
Joe

 

[Guest]

I put Hitachi Microdrive driver to http://www.xpefiles.com
under "Third Party","Shareware/Freeware". The file name is
"XPfildrvr1224.zip".
You can download it from there.

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Hi YG,

Interesting. And you say that you were actually able to use it on XPe so you can boot XPe from this microdrive?

Regards,
Slobodan

 

[Guest]

A million thank you's! That fixed all problems. I even tried booting XPP
SP2, and XPP thinks its booting from a fixed disk, even creating the pagefile
without incident.

Magnificient!

Dave Hudder

 

[KM]

"DeviceObject->Characteristics = (DeviceObject->Characteristics | pfs) & ~FILE_REMOVABLE_MEDIA;"

Simple and efficient

KM

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

"DeviceObject->Characteristics = (DeviceObject->Characteristics | pfs) & ~FILE_REMOVABLE_MEDIA;"

Simple and efficient

Yup. 4 lines need to be changed in filter sample driver in DDK I have done that long time ago. Unfortunately this works only if
BIOS/ntldr pair see HDD as fixed and offer int 13 functions on disk with 0x80 ID :-(
This is purely BIOS dependant approach.
But good things is that it either work perfectly or it do not work at all

Regards,
Slobodan

 

[KM]

Slobodan,

Yup. 4 lines need to be changed in filter sample driver in DDK I have done that long time ago. Unfortunately this works only
if
BIOS/ntldr pair see HDD as fixed and offer int 13 functions on disk with 0x80 ID :-(

Yup. I agree.
But (since MS currently does not control BIOS code at all) it is still good to fix "Windows" at least

Regards,
Konstantin

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Konstantin,

Yup. I agree.
But (since MS currently does not control BIOS code at all) it is still good to fix "Windows" at least

Well MS can do something about this. It took me months of working day and night to solve these problems along with other problems
trough additional drivers. Only what I can say is that for someone who wrote ntoskrnl (have sources of it) fix would be in few lines
like in case with removable bit if you decided to change disk driver sources from DDK used for disk.sys.
For sake of argument disk.sys driver could be modified to support in addition to current functionality fix disk override switch that
could be read from registry. Disk driver change is something that MS or we could do in matter of few hours. (With basic
functionality testing).

So regardless of complaints that every XPe customer made about removable bit they did not do anything to change it, so you figure
out who is responsible for what problem.

What can I say. Maybe they leave some room for us to have something to support or fix ;-) What would we do if everything was smooth
and intuitive

Regards,
Slobodan

 

[KM]

Slobodan,

Well MS can do something about this. It took me months of working day and night to solve these problems along with other problems
trough additional drivers. Only what I can say is that for someone who wrote ntoskrnl (have sources of it) fix would be in few
lines
like in case with removable bit if you decided to change disk driver sources from DDK used for disk.sys.

I really thought the removable bit fix would have gotten to SP2 (XP) but it did not (despite the demand for the fix). At least
nothing documented.
Maybe there is some registry flag(s) that turns on another branch of kernel or disk.sys code to change the default behaviour of the
removable bit.
Who knows.

For sake of argument disk.sys driver could be modified to support in addition to current functionality fix disk override switch
that
could be read from registry. Disk driver change is something that MS or we could do in matter of few hours. (With basic
functionality testing).

I absolutely agree. Although it is pretty usual development situation with MS API (or, better say,
non-publicly-available-in-source-form commercial software code).

So regardless of complaints that every XPe customer made about removable bit they did not do anything to change it, so you figure
out who is responsible for what problem.

What can I say. Maybe they leave some room for us to have something to support or fix ;-) What would we do if everything was
smooth
and intuitive

I am with you here

Konstantin

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Konstantin,

In SP2 classpnp.sys there is only one interesting registry entry called "HackMask". They might have added in the last moment some
additional bit to support fix/removable config.
In Win2003 DDK there is no mention of rem fix but HackMask is there and it is used for some other patching.

Regards,
Slobodan

 

[Guest]

YG,

Thank you for your help with this. I've been waiting for this capability
for quite some time now. In fact, I contacted Magicstor (a different vendor
of microdrives) last week requesting information on if their ATA microdrives
are configurable to be fixed. No response to date. I also contacted their
Canadian distributor who was supposed to send the request through, but
similarly, no response.

Thanks again,
Joe

 

[KM]

Slobodan,

I haven't played with Win2003 DDK but what I have seen was that HackMask only uses a couple of bits (the classpnp sample driver
code). Other bits are reserved. Who knows how MS uses the bits.

Obviously, default removable bit policy has been developed for Desktop computers. Moving to embedded space always requires more
flexibility. Anyway, lets hope someday we can get such functionality for free

Konstantin