www.xpefiles.com

green72:

Some things we ran into and how we solved them: 

USE A CF to IDE ADAPTER...lol....
This enables you to have partitions (more then one) and it really makes your life easier.

Make sure you use fat32 instead of FAT16 or FAT12.

We had problems with several CF cards because of the BIOS LARGE-LBA TRANSLATION (!!!)
Several cards worked, many didn't, looking at the cards (with the same brand, labels, fabrication numbers and everything) we noted that there was a difference in heads, cylinders and sectors. Disabling LBA/LARGE translation solved our problems (which we found out after lang days and nights troubleshooting).

Fdisk, format/s from a ms-dos environment. Windows98 for instance (We used Hirens BootCD) 

Copy files from a graphical environment (WIN PE or XP, or BartPE or MINI-PE or something alike). If you don't you can have problems with the long names not being copied.

If you ever have a card that seems to have bad sectors or does not boot, don't throw it away yet. Try to fdisk, format/s and copy the files all over again and in our case they _ALL_ worked again.

 

Anyway, hope to be of help to someone being as desperate as we were :)

 

Richard.

Hi Richard,

Thanks for the post, great info there.

Another thing to keep in mind is that it's best to prepare the CF on the actual target device since the disk geometry may be reported differently on your desktop than it is on the device. That situation can create a problem where you partition and mark the CF active on your desktop but it won't boot on the device.

Brad