Compact flash to sata adapter problems. And D partitions and is reported as fixed disk (thanks to hitachi filter) and I can access both C and D partitions on CF.
Notebook: Toshiba Portege 3110CT Processor: 300Mhz RAM: 192MB HDD: ATA-4, Ultra ATA/33, UDMA/33 2.5' Disk. CD: n a USB: non-bootable via BIOS FDD: 1.4MB floppy disk which is bootable. I am attempting to install a Compact flash card in a CF-IDE adapter with a 4GB SanDisk into a Toshiba 3110CT as the system HDD. This replaces the original 6GB IDE HDD.
I have formatted the Compact flash card as two partitions, C and D, both formatted as FAT16. Partition D which is 800MB housing the Windows XP SP1 distribution. Partition C which is 3000MB will be the system disk when completed. I can start the windows XP SP1 install (i386 winnt.exe) and it loads the setup files, it then reboots. The system reboots on the Compact Flash and continues until is gets to the partition section of the install of Windows XP SP1. It can go no further as is says the existing partitions are not part of a known disk drive. The wording indicates that the Compact flash is seen as a removable disk and that the installation is looking for a conventional HDD.
Anybody installed a Compact Flash card as a Windows XP SP1 system disk and overcome the obstacle that Windows XP thinks the Compact Flash boot disk is a removal HDD? I think it just needs some sort of driver for the Compact Flash card to 'fox' Windows XP into thinking it's dealing with a HDD. Or is there some flag I can set on the 4GB Ultra SanDisk Compact flash to says it's a HDD? Thanks for any help on this.
I'm a mark II learning monkey. Left hemisphere asks questions and draws stick figures while right hemisphere solves problems. Found this useful as it keeps the left hemisphere busy and thus out of the way, such that it doesn't annoying the right hemisphere while it's working on solving the problem.
/ Left brain. I now have more questions, but figure I can solve them before anyone else gets around to answering them. I sometimes writing down a question to help in better identifying the answer. Just for a laugh since I got my CF card, pseudo fixed disk set up with paging and all, I now find all 56K modems (USB V92 and/or builtin V90) on the notebook seem to think their COM port(s) are already in use (error 633), even when you re-assign the COM port.
Something is bound to something else somewhere and thus conflicting. I can reinstall the original HDD to rule out hardware issues and then focus on software links between COM processes in the new CF environment.
Hey all, I have another hairbrained topic question. I was trying to find a way to make a raid 5 array from usb thumb drives. I came across software called virtuaraid from redsky studio, but they went out of business, I think. I cannot get their software anywhere. I know that software raid is natively supported in windows xp (with a couple of unsupported hacks.): But, in order to make a disk dynamic, it has to be non-removable. There is a registry hack for firewire devices to let windows see them as fixed disks: HKEYLOCALMACHINE SYSTEM CurrentControlSet Servic es dmadmin Parameters Then setting the following key: EnableDynamicConversionFor1394 to 1 allows firewire devices to be turned into dynamic disks.
From some other articles I found out that you can take an ide, sata drive, and after hooking them up normally making a dynamic raid array out of them, then after putting them into individual usb enclosures they will still function properly. Anyway, after reading this (short) article: and I tried downloading the hitachi fixed disk driver from here: I used this driver on a 256 mb kingston, and it installed fine (no blue screens, even after reboot), and it works fine; transfers data as it should too. In the above link there is just the one inf file, and after modifying it appropriately it does appear as a basic disk, (both in diskmgmt.msc, and diskpart.exe) but the option to convert to a dynamic disk is greyed out in diskmgmt.msc, and diskpart.exe gives the following error: 'The selected disk cannot be upgraded to dynamic. Please select a valid basic disk to convert.'
I think what I need to do is somehow include the cfadisk.c file, from the above download, but although I can tell it has something to do with the c (or c) programming language, I am at a loss as to how to actually include it. This is the header from the cfadisk.c file (13kb): /. cfadisk.c - CompactFlash fixed disk filter driver. Copyright (c) Hitachi Global Storage Technologies 2003.
All rights reserved. This driver filters IOCTLSTORAGEQUERYPROPERTY so that Windows XP can. correctly handle CompactFlash device as a fixed disk. This is a little beyond me, but I think I am close to being able to do this, anyone have some suggestions?
TIA, Redwraith94. I have finally had success. The slow 18x speed issue was due to the CF-to-IDE card not supporting DMA. I got some 4 GB '150x' 'Samsung oem' compact flash cards from ebay. Turns out they are 60x junk.
I was ripped off. I decided to use them for this experiment anyway. I just got a dual CF-to-IDE card from ebay. These cards support DMA. I tested them with the “150x” cards.
With this adapter I can now get 10.5 MB/s. Using USB CF card readers I was only getting 8.9 MB/s.
So apparently this new card even out performs USB adapters. Windows still registers these cards as removable even thou I am using the adapter. I decided to use the modified hitachi driver as explained on USBHacks. ( I had previously used the driver with a USB card reader.
Windows no longer registered it as removable would not allow me to make a dynamic disk.) I used the same driver and this time windows allowed me to make the 2 4gb cards dynamic. After some playing I got the cards set up as an spanned volume.
Im not sure if this is truly striped or just showing the drive as 1 volume. HD Tune still shows the two cards as separate and I can runn it on each by its self. Sisoft shows no major improvement in speed. I have posted screen shots at I am going to play some more and I will update you. Im trying now with the sandisk extreme III cards. Connected to the on board IDE im only getting 2.6 MB/s again. I connected to a extrenal drive enclosure and im up to 7.0 MB/s, still a lot slower then it should be.
HD Tune shows the disks in the raid support UDMA Mode 2 (Ultra ATA/33). For the Sandisk it showed UDMA Mode 5. I dont know why it was so high but running so slow. Connected to the USB HD enclosure it does not show any info at all. The other problem Im running across is that the BIOS showes the cards as IDE HDs at the top of the boot order. But no matter how many times I put them in the bottom of the HD boot order every time i save changes they are back at the top after the reboot. The computer trys to boot from them.
I have to switch them in the bios to IDE removable. Perhaps if I could get them to stay as IDE hard drives I would not need to change the driver. I think ill try to upgrade my bios. That may help. Any other ideas?