NTFS Format under XPe

[Guest]

I have had an issue where formatting the CF in my device under a CD booted
XPe resulted in "A Disk Read Error has occurred"... whereas formatting the
same CF under WinPE worked fine.
I have finally tracked this down to one parameter in the NFTS $Boot file
header.
Under WinPE, the "Number of Heads" field gets written as 0x0020, under XPe
it is written as 0x00FF.
The drive geometry is reported as 31 cylinders, 255 Tracks per cylinder
(heads), 63 sectors per track, and 512 bytes per sector...
So on the face of it, the XPe value seems to be the correct value, yet the
boot fails...

So....

1. Does anyone know why the two different environments result in two
different values for this parameter?

2. Does anyone know why the seemingly incorrect value of 0x0020 works,
whereas the 'correct' value of 0x00FF doesn't.

Thanks...

Simon.

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Stormblade,

Only way for windows to read correct geometry is to obtain it from BIOS. So
this happens only if CF is present during the boot. Unfortunately parameters
are not always passed trough registry :-(

To avoid this and similar problems MS recommend that you use pure old DOS
and fdisk,format, bootprep tools and then convert FAT to NTFS.

Regards,
Slobodan