Making Compact Flash Bootable

[Venkat]

Hi,

I have searched this newsgroup and have read many posts about making a
CompactFlash bootable.

My target device is an embedded PC that does not have a CD-ROM or
Floppy drive.

I used a CF-to-IDE adapter to connect my CF card to another machine. I
then booted into DOS using a bootdisk, used FDISK to create a DOS
partition and set it active, and then used FORMAT to format the flash
disk.

Then when I put the disk back into my embedded PC, it will not boot.

When I first received the disk from the manufacturer of the PC, they
had configured it to be bootable and it was working fine. I tried to
format the disk using a USB card reader, and I think that caused it to
stop working. I'm trying to get it to boot again

Thanks for any help

 

[Brad Combs]

Venkat,

You missed one important step! After you format the CF run bootprep.exe to
create an XP compatible bootloader on the disk. For example is the CF is C:
you would run bootprep /dC You will be prompted to confirm twice and the
bootloader will be updated. You can find bootprep.exe at C:\Program
Files\Windows Embedded\utilities\bootprep.exe. It is a DOS program.

HTH,
Brad

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Venkat,

My target device is an embedded PC that does not have a CD-ROM or
Floppy drive.

Unfortunately it is vital that you do fdisk, format, and bootprep on target device so that disk geometry seen by this BIOS is
written to CF :-(

Regards,
Slobodan

 

[Thomas Johansen]

Hi

If you PC has USB or IDE, yot could boot the PC form af DOS harddisk og a
USB key with DOS boot. Then run fdisk/format/bootprep from that boot media.

/Thomas

 

[Semir]

Hi,

Don't forget to format CF to be FAT16 not FAT32, in most cases you don't
have to make bootprep,try and send results.Maybe this help.

Semir

 

[Thomas Johansen]

Hi,

Don't forget to format CF to be FAT16 not FAT32, in most cases you don't
have to make bootprep,try and send results.Maybe this help.

or NTFS... what ever you like. But you allways need to ude bootprep.. No
bootloader, no boot

 

[Venkat]

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for your tips, I think I have it working now.

I did the following (hopefully this will help anyone else who's having
a similar problem):

Using a CF-to-IDE adapter, I plugged my CF card into another machine.
-I booted that machine using a DOS bootdisk
-deleted all partitions from the CF
-created a DOS partition, set it active
-formatted the partition into FAT16
-BOOTPREP'd the partition

Then I plugged the CF into a USB card reader and copied my XPe image
onto it.
Then I plugged the CF into my target device, it booted fine and ran FBA
to completion.
Then I plugged back the CF back into my other machine (using the
CF-to-IDE adapter), booted into XP Professional, and ran CONVERT.EXE to
convert the CF into NTFS.
Then I plugged the CF back into the target device, and it boots fine.

From now on, when I'm testing out more images, I simply delete all the

files from the CF (leaving the NTFS file system intact), and simply
copy the new image onto it

Thanks again!

 

[Thomas Johansen]

Thanks for your tips, I think I have it working now.

I did the following (hopefully this will help anyone else who's having
a similar problem):

Using a CF-to-IDE adapter, I plugged my CF card into another machine.
-I booted that machine using a DOS bootdisk
-deleted all partitions from the CF
-created a DOS partition, set it active
-formatted the partition into FAT16
-BOOTPREP'd the partition

Here you actually just could have used Disk Manager or PartionMagic from
Windows operating system and made the need partitions. Saved you a DOS boot
and a convert.
But that just details

 

[RaiderDav]

I've had a similar problem recently, and used a little app from HP to
set the partition as active:
http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/hpcpqdt/us/download/20306.html
I use a USB CF reader and format the CF with the HP utility, check the
create startup disk option, point to a bootable Win98 floppy, then copy
bootprep to the CF. That lets me boot up with the CF without any other
devices attached and run bootprep /dC. Just thought I'd throw that out
since I was struggling for a while with non-bootable CF media.

Dave

 

[TechnoPC]

I am also trying to create a bootable CF card with a card reader plugged into the USB port of my Windows XP PC. However, I could not find the file "bootprep.exe". I do not see any folder called "Windows Embedded" in Program Files. Has something changed since 2005? Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you.