USB Boot Issue with Multiple USB Flash Drives

[Boby George]

Recently I have run into a USB boot problem when multiple USB Flash
Drives are connected to the system. Below is the information about my
target and tools. I was wondering whether the problem described below is
an inherent problem with XPe.

XPe Image is created with XPe Toolkit SP2 + FP2007 + Update Rollup 1.0

Target hardware has an on-board USB flash Drive and multiple external
USB ports. USB boot works fine as long as there are no external USB Mass
Storage Device is connected (Attached CD-ROM creates no problem). I see
the following 2 cases.

1. Target has On-Board Flash Drive installed with XPe. One external USB
pen drive is connected to the target, which do not have a boot sector
installed. The system starts booting, and after a couple of seconds
during the windows banner is displayed the system takes a checkstop
0x7B. If the external pen drive is removed, the system boots just fine.

2. Target has On-Board Flash Drive installed with XPe. One external USB
pen drive is connected to the target, which do not have a boot sector
installed. During the early boot, target reports ntldr missing message.
This kind of tells me BIOS did read the boot sector of On-Board Flash
Drive and found out it needs to load the NT loader. But it was not able
to find the NTLDR from the same disk. This is very strange. Target boots
fine if the external pen drive is removed.

I have also tried it on 2 different Intel Reference boards, Allagash and
Arbuckle Mountain. Both of them gives the same error. Also tested with 2
different BIOS vendors, AMI and Insyde. Both the gives the same error.

Anybody out there seen the same problem? Any recommendations?

Regards,

Boby George
Curtiss Wright Controls, Embedded Computing

 

[Mike Warren]

Anybody out there seen the same problem? Any recommendations?

Yes, I have had the same problem and the only cure I found was to use
2 different brands of USB flash. This happened when I used Sandisk as
both drives. I can't remember what other brand I used.

 

[Boby George]

Mike, In my case my On-Board drive is from SMI (Silicon Motion) Vendor.
And the external USB drives that I have used for testing were Crucial
and Memorex. It is possible but could be unlikely that both of them are
using the same SMI USB-to-NAND controller. I will try to check the
vendor ID of the external drives using device manager.

Have you seen both the cases 1 and 2 that I have mentioned?

Boby

 

[Mike Warren]

Have you seen both the cases 1 and 2 that I have mentioned?

That project is on hold at the moment but I will be getting back to
it in a couple of weeks. The error I was getting was the missing
NTLDR message.